Privacy-preserving Wireless Data Transmission for e-Healthcare Applications

1. Introduction Recent advances in body sensors and wireless communications have revealed the possibility of providing remote healthcare monitoring and fast emergency services to patients via a smart e-healthcare system. The e-healthcare system pervasively adopts electronic and portable devices, such as smart phones, to monitor, transmit, and store patient medical records, and shifts healthcare tasks from a traditional clinical environment to a pervasive patient-centered setting. Such system has been widely regarded as a potential solution to reduce healthcare expenses through more efficient use of clinical resources and earlier detection of medical conditions. However, the e-healthcare system leads to more challenging privacy issues especially when wireless data transmission from patients to healthcare service providers is employed. To increase public acceptability from privacy-sensitive patients, it is critical to investigate their privacy requirements for various e-healthcare applications and maximally preserve patient privacy based on these requirements.