Secure sensor node with Raspberry Pi

Information Technology, when implemented in healthcare, has the potential to radically improve the quality and efficiency of services being made available to patients. With the advent of mobile computing and wireless sensor networks, data acquisition and processing has become much faster and less expensive. Since there is an increase in possible software attacks on privacy and safety of health applications, safety and reliability of the sensor data is an important issue that needs to be addressed in this field. In this paper, a unique design of a secure sensor node prototype has been proposed and implemented, which communicates over Bluetooth using RC4 encryption algorithm between a mobile phone and their monitoring equipment. The design uses an accelerometer based sensor, which can be used as a prototype for a body sensor for fall detection in elderly people [1]. The data from the sensor is processed, encrypted and wirelessly communicated by Raspberry Pi (a Single Board Computer) to a mobile phone. The security issues have been addressed in two ways. Firstly, the loss of data is prevented by introducing a wired connection between the Raspberry Pi and the accelerometer based sensor. Secondly, a secure data communication is ensured by encrypting the sensor data using an encryption key sent from the mobile phone using Bluetooth. Our prototype, can be used to investigate and design several new sensor nodes with different interfaces, encryption and compression algorithms. The future work extends the application of this secure sensor node to the design of the body sensor module.