Experimental platform for usability testing of secure medical sensor network protocols

Implementing security mechanisms such as access control for clinical use is a challenging research issue in BSN due to its required heterogeneous operating responses ranging from chronic diseases management to emergency care. To ensure the clinical uptake of the BSN technology, appropriately designed security mechanisms are essential. Several experimental sensor network platforms have emerged in recent years targeted for clinical use. However, few of them consider the importance of security issues such as privacy and access control, and how these can impact the usability of the platform, while others develop BSN security without considering how a prototype implementation would be received by clinicians in real-life situations. The purpose of this paper is to present our initial effort in building a flexible experimental platform for providing a basic infrastructure with symmetric AES encryption of sensor and configuration data with suitable user interfaces. The pluggable module provides the protocol for authentication and key generation such that modules with different security properties and respective user interface consequences can be easily compared and evaluated.