Sustainable securing of Medical Cyber-Physical Systems for the healthcare of the future

Abstract

Over the last years, solutions based on Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) have opted for the deployment of eHealth services to provide a higher level of quality and safety to medical processes, with which to mitigate human errors. As a result, Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPS) is a new disruptive approach oriented to enable smart healthcare systems to monitor, process and make autonomous decisions without the need to involve doctors and caregivers. Yet, current MCPS pose several open challenges, the security of medical devices being one of the most critical ones because of its close relationship with patients’ safety. To deal with these issues, mobile edge cloud computing – or fog computing – can be used to improve the security of MCPS by enabling the deployment and management of efficient resources into the network edge. In this context, we propose the novel concept of Virtual Medical Device as a sustainable and efficient mechanism deployed in the network edge to ease and provide dynamism and low latency for achieving security in MCPS. Additionally, we also propose a fog computing-oriented framework to enable real-time and dynamic management of physical and virtual medical devices as well as network infrastructure composing MCPS. To show our solution feasibility, we designed a reactive and proactive use case depicting security concerns of current MCPS. We also describe how our framework arranges MCPS with management policies that consider patients’ vital signs, network communications, and location of medical devices and patients.