Health-Post: A Delay-Tolerant Secure Long-Term Health Care Scheme in Rural Area

In this paper, we propose a delay-tolerant secure long-term health care scheme (Health-Post) to monitor patient´s sensitive personal health information (PHI), particularly at the rural areas. To minimize the overall health care cost, Health-Post provides network connectivity to rural areas in developing region using conventional transportation vehicles (e.g., cars, buses) as relay nodes. These vehicles are expected to store, carry, and forward the PHI to the health-service-provider located mostly at the city area following an opportunistic routing. Health-Post improves network performance by providing incentive to the cooperative vehicles. The proposed scheme encompasses identity based cryptography to ensure security and privacy of the PHI during the routing period by using short digital signature and pseudo-identity. Network fairness and resistant to different possible attacks are ensured by the Health-Post. Extensive security and performance analyses demonstrate that the Health-Post scheme is able to achieve desired security requirements with effectiveness in terms of high delivery ratio and lower average delay.