A secure approach to monitoring emergency health resources

This proposal presents an optimized, efficient and secure system designed to improve healthcare staff management in emergency situations through a complete tool to classify victims in a emergency situation according the severity of their condition, providing at the same time their location and the best route to reach them. The developed tool consists on a mobile application (assigned to medical and healthcare staff), a web service and Near Field Communication tags (assigned to victims). The mobile application supports secure communication among health staff and implements triage algorithms which result is stored in NFC tags. Apart from this, it helps to indicate which should be the next victim to be treated. The developed web service provides a global view of the emergency status and the current position of victims and staff. Data security is a key objective, overall in health applications; for this reason, tokens are used to protect the triage results before being stored in NFC tags, and the use of IDentity-Based Signcryption provides confidentiality and authentication to communications. Two different signcryption methods are used depending on the communication mode (peer-to-peer or broadcast mode).