Smart health record management with secure NFC-enabled mobile devices

Abstract

Abstract Patients with dispersed health records face the challenge of accessing readily available health history and mobility across different hospitals. It can hinder timely diagnosis and treatment, especially in the case of an emergency or for travellers. Cloud-based solutions have open challenges of interoperability and integration, higher challenges for security and privacy and may lack 24/7 support for the high availability of health history. Existing portable systems store limited health information for only a specific hospital and do not support mobility of patients across different hospitals. In this paper, we propose a next-generation portable Smart Health Record Management system with secure Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled mobile devices to retain the dispersed health records on an S-MAPLE (Secure Mobility-Assisted PortabLE) health folder. It provides secure yet easy access to up to date health history and assists patient mobility across hospitals. An NFC-based Host Card Emulation (HCE) mode maintains a software-based contactless mobile-based health wallet on the patient׳s mobile device. An authorized medical professional can access it directly and selectively with their mobile devices, over low energy wireless interfaces of NFC and Bluetooth. NFC provides secure proof-of-locality and ease of access. A tamper-resistant storage Secure Element (SE), end-to-end mutual authentication with attestation scheme, variant of the Ciphertext-policy Attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme and backup on a secure digital vault further secure the S-MAPLE health folder. We present the system requirements, system architecture and security requirements with a brief overview of the security solutions for the proposed health system. The implementation and performance of the system prototype using mid-range Android-based mobile devices has acceptable results.