Privacy and emergency response in e-healthcare leveraging wireless body sensor networks

Electronic healthcare is becoming a vital part of our living environment and exhibits advantages over paper-based legacy systems. Privacy is the foremost concern of patients and the biggest impediment to e-healthcare deployment. In addressing privacy issues, conflicts from the functional requirements must be taken into account. One such requirement is efficient and effective response to medical emergencies. In this article, we provide detailed discussions on the privacy and security issues in e-healthcare systems and viable techniques for these issues. Furthermore, we demonstrate the design challenge in the fulfillment of conflicting goals through an exemplary scenario, where the wireless body sensor network is leveraged, and a sound solution is proposed to overcome the conflict.