A novel trust management scheme in pervasive healthcare

Pervasive healthcare, is an important application of pervasive computing technologies that has seen a vast development in recent years. It enables patients to access healthcare services, anywhere, anytime ubiquitously. But, patients using these devices have to confront the problem of unknown healthcare providers and other security issues. This paper proposes an integrated trust management mechanism to compute the trust in a pervasive healthcare environment by combining both reputation and credential models. The aim is to provide a secure and reliable healthcare even with a little transaction history. In the proposed work, the pervasive healthcare system is considered as a form of community wherein each patient node and its one hop neighbors are considered as a community. We propose a novel non-linear trust calculation mechanism for improvement in performance of the system. Also the security challenges faced in pervasive healthcare are addressed based on our trust management scheme.