A Security and Privacy Survey for WSN in e-Health Applications

Wireless sensors networks (WSN) are getting a special place in the development of e-Health application, due to its characteristics such as: not intrusive design, low energy consumption, low price and its flexibility to integrate into health care environments. However, the use of WSN in these kind of environments must consider those security and privacy mechanisms required by applicable personal data protection legislations to provide end-to-end guarantees to the patient´s information. Applications and research projects are taking place to offer e-Health solutions with these features, however still there is not framework or standard to support interoperability among these or to provide a design criteria for future developments. Towards this goal, in this paper we survey a set of e-Health proposals for WSN, focusing on the mechanisms used to provide security and privacy to support real-time and multimedia data transmission in WSN.