Context-Based Access Control to Medical Data in Smart Homes

Continuous progress in mobile wireless devices and miniaturization in medical devices are pervasive healthcare into reality. With the help of these devices, a large number of people, especially the elderly, can benefit now from high healthcare quality in the comfort of their own homes. Some of the major concerns that still need to be addressed before these devices get a wide acceptance include protecting the security and privacy of medical data collected by these devices. Traditional static access control solutions do not address the complex dynamic security requirements of healthcare applications. This paper presents context-based access control architecture to fulfill the security requirements of protecting medical data in pervasive healthcare. The system continuously collects and analyses medical data, and updates the access control rules to the data based on the dynamically changing medical condition of the user.