Secure Data Transmission Protocol for Medical Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have attracted much interest in the last decade. It opened a new range of applications such as large area monitoring including environmental monitoring, wildlife exploration, and real time patient medical data which is collected by using wireless sensors. The WSN provides the options of flexibilities and cost saving for patients and healthcare industries. At the same time, there is a growing concern about the hospitals´ ability to provide effective care during disaster events. For these reasons, tools that automate patient monitoring have the potential to greatly improve efficiency and quality of health care. In hospitals, medical data sensors which monitor patients produce an increasingly large volume of real-time data. The transmission of this data through wireless networks in a hospital becomes a crucial problem because the medical information of an individual is highly sensitive. It must be kept private and secure. The purpose of this paper is to present our initial effort in building a flexible strategy to achieve secure data transmission in medical wireless sensor networks.