Privacy Preservation for Wireless Sensor Networks in Healthcare: State of the Art, and Open Research Challenges

The advent of miniature biosensors has generated numerous opportunities for deploying wireless sensor networks in healthcare. However, an important barrier is that acceptance by healthcare stakeholders is influenced by the effectiveness of privacy safeguards for personal and intimate information which is collected and transmitted over the air, within and beyond these networks. In particular, these networks are progressing beyond traditional sensors, towards also using multimedia sensors, which raise further privacy concerns. Paradoxically, less research has addressed privacy protection, compared to security. Nevertheless, privacy protection has gradually evolved from being assumed an implicit by-product of security measures, and it is maturing into a research concern in its own right. However, further technical and socio-technical advances are needed. As a contribution towards galvanising further research, the hallmarks of this paper include: (i) a literature survey explicitly anchored on privacy preservation, it is underpinned by untangling privacy goals from security goals, to avoid mixing privacy and security concerns, as is often the case in other papers; (ii) a critical survey of privacy preservation services for wireless sensor networks in healthcare, including threat analysis and assessment methodologies; it also offers classification trees for the multifaceted challenge of privacy protection in healthcare, and for privacy threats, attacks and countermeasures; (iii) a discussion of technical advances complemented by reflection over the implications of regulatory frameworks; (iv) a discussion of open research challenges, leading onto offers of directions for future research towards unlocking the door onto privacy protection which is appropriate for healthcare in the twenty-first century.