An Architecture Based on Internet of Things to Support Mobility and Security in Medical Environments

Recently the problem of providing effective and appropriate healthcare to elderly and disable people is an important field in relative to the aging of population problems. The objective of information and communication technologies (ICT) is to focus on the new technologies the medical environments, so that it can provide management to accelerate and improve the clinical process. Our contribution is to introduce an approach based on Internet of things (IoT) in medical environments to achieve a global connectivity with the patient, sensors and everything around it. The main goal of this globality feature is to provide a context awareness to make the patient´s life easier and the clinical process more effective. To achieve this approach, firstly has been developed an architecture which has been designed to offer great potential and flexibility of communications, monitoring and control. This architecture includes several advanced communication technologies; among them are 6LoWPAN and RFID/NFC, which are the basis of the IoT. Moreover the research deal with the problems related to the mobility and security that happens when IoT is applied in medical environments. The mobility issue requires developing a protocol over 6LoWPAN network to be carried out in sensor networks with high specification related with low power consumption and capacity. While in the RFID/NFC technologies need to support secure communications, our proposal is to introduce a set of security techniques and cryptographic SIM card to authenticate, encrypt and sign the communications with medical devices. The preliminary results showed a reduction of time in the handover process with the protocol for mobility defined, by omitting the stages of addressing and simplifying the MIPv6 protocol. In addition to increase the security in the communications carried out by NFC devices enhanced with the inclusion of cryptographic SIM card.