Lightweight and privacy-preserving agent data transmission for mobile Healthcare

With the pervasiveness of smartphones and the advance of wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs), mobile healthcare (m-healthcare) has attracted considerable interest recently. In m-Healthcare, users´ smartphones serve as bridges connecting their WBSNs and the healthcare center (HCC), i.e., send users´ personal health information (PHI) collected by WBSNs to the HCC and receive the feedback. However, users´ smartphones are not always available (e.g., left at home or out of power), resulting in an unexpected interruption of medical services sometimes, which are not considered in most existing schemes for m-healthcare. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and privacy-preserving agent data transmission scheme for m-healthcare in opportunistic social networks on condition that the smartphone is not available. By using the proposed protocol, we can provide uninterrupted healthcare while keeping the user´s identity and PHI private during the agent transmitting of PHI. Security and performance analysis show that the proposed scheme can realize privacy-preservation and achieve secure end-to-end communication for m-healthcare, and is suitable for resource-limited WBSNs.