Privacy-preserving location and mobility management to support tether-free patients in ad-hoc networks

A major driver of healthcare cost is the inefficiencies associated keeping less-critical patients overnight in the hospital when these patients could be treated as outpatients and received comparable quality of care. To this end, we propose the concept of tether-free patient to support patient mobility and ensure privacy-preserving healthcare. The paper addresses issues related to the design of a ubiquitous architectures to support tetherless care and proposes a robust, scalable and secure framework to location management of tether-free patients in mobile, wireless environments. The main building blocks and functionalities of the proposed architecture are described, and the algorithms used for secure registration and discovery, as the patient roams around, are presented. The complexity analysis of the proposed schemes is discussed.