Exploring Security, Privacy, and Ethical Considerations in E-Healthcare

Q 1: What are the Security and Privacy concerns of using IoT (Internet of Things) and BWSNs (Body Wireless Sensors Networks) in to E healthcare especially in monitoring patients’ data

According to Deebak et al (2019), the significance of privacy and security is central to the Medical Internet of Things (MIoT). Large amount of increasingly diverse measure of real time, high sensitivity data is produced through MIoT. Jeopardising the data security of medical systems within the network could entail disastrous outcomes. Other than this, all of the phases of data collection entail the privacy conditionality regarding information of patients. According to Saha et al (2019) the security requirements are four in number. These are Data Integrity, Data Usability, Data Auditing and Patient Information Privacy.

In this context, Tang et al (2019) have envisaged that existing solutions which could resolve such security concerns from a functional perspective. The problem in this respect is that the MIoT devices suffer from insufficient capabilities of memory, communication and computation processes and thus, these require extensively high performance, scalable and powerful computing as well as storage infrastructure so that data could be stored and processed on real time basis. Application of storage servers in the cloud computing domain for the purpose of proper storage of collected medical data since the cloud services could facilitate development of promising solutions for healthcare data management through pervasive flexibility and ability to enable operators to access shared resources.

Data Encryption

Data encryption could be applied as security measure involving communication and information exchanges concerning predefined rules.

Access Control

Access control has been suggested by Hamza et al (2019) to be the process through which MIoT generated data system could identify the operators through predefined parameters so as to prevent unauthorised access to the data bases. According to Almulhim and Zaman (2018), several encryption methods are applied to control access such as Symmetric Key Encryption (SKE), Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) and Asymmetric Key Encryption (AKE).

Furthermore, the Health Information Exchange (HIE) process involves sharing information of the patients electronically through specific authorisation channels for information exchange in a manner so that the information could be audited. The emphasis is required to be concentrated on ensuring the reliability of the mechanism and policies of security enforcement. The non-cryptic messages have to be substituted through cryptic approaches which are mostly not cost expensive and are complicated as well. According to Zhou et al (2017), the requirements are associated with application of a novel scheme of BWSNs. The envisaged protocols are required to focus on both the front and back ends of the BWSN frameworks. A particular security protocol has to be instituted in between the personal wireless nodes and the wearable sensors. These personal wireless nobs are required to authenticate the operator access mechanisms through utilisation of the data bases of the healthcare centres. Furthermore, the personal wireless nodes would have to be enabled to request health data and the body sensors would have to forward the encrypted data directly to the nodes, however, the authentication front end programme has to be instituted first at the body sensor levels.

Q2: How you can assess ethical impacts of using a certain technology in E healthcare system?

The ethical complications pertaining to electronic healthcare delivery systems pertain to the issues reflective of the relationship in between the patients and their physicians involving factors such as autonomy, patient interest management and obtainment of informed consent from the patients. The establishment of the National Health Insurance Program and the National Identification Authority Policy have outlined the necessities such as capturing, analysing and management of interoperability research policies. The orientation has been towards ensuring of criminal surveillance and security management through control of information exchange. The possible utilisation of information could implicate the concerns from pertinent constitutional elements concerning the ethical dimensions.

According to Carman (2016), the State Public Health Privacy Act has outlined the proper delineation of characteristics of health information in the manner that health information would include the oral, electronic, visual, written, pictorial and physical forms of information which could represent the psychological and physical health status of healthcare subscribers, the conditions of their pathological recovery, the treatment administered to them and the products or services which have been purchased for their care delivery mechanisms. As per the opinion of Van Wynsberghe (2016), such information could disclose the identity of the individuals undergoing healthcare service based assistance reception and there could be reasonable as well as logical basis to consider that such information could be applied in individual prospect or in unison with other strands of data, to divulge the specifics associated with healthcare treatment delivered to particular individuals. Such information could be generated from the sources which could be reasonably available to the predictable recipients of such communicated information. Thus, such a broad definition could outline in detail the threat measure posed by EHIT to the professional sanctity of the relationship in between the physicians and their patients. From a definitive perspective, extensive unwarranted intrusive oversight could be implemented through the medium of Internet on such sensitive information exchange processes associated with E-healthcare.

According to Stolt et al (2018), the inevitability of encroachment on the private electronic healthcare information through EHIT is apparent within the working architecture of such processes. The source of this breach of ethics could be identified within the subjective notions associated with the contention between the element of social propriety versus the utilitarian factors which dominate the decision formulation processes within the healthcare systems. The compromises involving personal information of patients have consistently occurred in terms of the longitudinal research based on specific measures of the patient populations. The first casualty in such encroachment on private information of the patients is their informed consent. The extensive nature of the information encroachment in terms of the clinical medicinal and clinical epidemiological perspectives often precludes any opportunity by the legal structures to protect the patient specific protected health information. According to Peeters (2020), the promulgation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996) was purposed upon the necessity to design the mechanisms through which investigation and accordance of punishment to the improper disclosure of the sensitive health information could be performed and this act covered not only the healthcare institutions by the insurance organisations as well.

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Reference List

Almulhim, M. and Zaman, N., 2018, February. Proposing secure and lightweight authentication scheme for IoT based E-health applications. In 2018 20th International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology (ICACT) (pp. 481-487). IEEE.

Carman, N., 2016. Healthcare Law & Ethics.

Deebak, B.D., Al-Turjman, F., Aloqaily, M. and Alfandi, O., 2019. An Authentic-Based Privacy Preservation Protocol for Smart e-Healthcare Systems in IoT. IEEE Access, 7, pp.135632-135649.

Hamza, R., Yan, Z., Muhammad, K., Bellavista, P. and Titouna, F., 2019. A privacy-preserving cryptosystem for IoT E-healthcare. Information Sciences.

Peeters, E.J., 2020. Quality Pastoral Relationships in Healthcare Settings: Guidelines for Codes of Ethics. Journal of Pastoral Care & Counseling, 74(1), pp.42-52.

Saha, R., Kumar, G., Rai, M.K., Thomas, R. and Lim, S.J., 2019. Privacy Ensured ${e} $-Healthcare for Fog-Enhanced IoT Based Applications. IEEE Access, 7, pp.44536-44543.

Stolt, M., Leino-Kilpi, H., Ruokonen, M., Repo, H. and Suhonen, R., 2018. Ethics interventions for healthcare professionals and students: A systematic review. Nursing ethics, 25(2), pp.133-152.

Tang, W., Ren, J., Deng, K. and Zhang, Y., 2019. Secure Data Aggregation of Lightweight E-Healthcare IoT Devices With Fair Incentives. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 6(5), pp.8714-8726.

Van Wynsberghe, A., 2016. Healthcare robots: Ethics, design and implementation. Routledge.

Zhou, J., Cao, Z., Dong, X. and Vasilakos, A.V., 2017. Security and privacy for cloud-based IoT: Challenges. IEEE Communications Magazine, 55(1), pp.26-33.