Ayushman: A secure, usable pervasive health monitoring system

Ayushman is a pervasive health monitoring system which has the ability to collect, process, store and display health data in a secure and easy to use manner. Recent years have seen considerable activity in this field. Most of these systems tend to treat health monitoring as an extension to generic sensor networks. and depend on a network of wearable and implanted, medical and ambient sensors (called a body area network) for data collection and transport. We contend that this paradigm is not suitable for medical monitoring given the low reliability of the sensors, and the mission critical nature of medical monitoring. Further, the existing systems mainly focus on patient monitoring and do not consider security at all, and those that do, treat it in an isolated manner. With Ayushman we present a system which addresses both these issues. It integrates sensors and highly capable entities in the back-end to provide robust health monitoring. It also considers security as an integral part of its design. Sensors in Ayushman utilize physiological values based security for securing their communication. Our design approach enables Ayushman to provide health monitoring in a secure and usable manner - a property that traditional systems lack.