Hierarchical mobile cloud with social grouping for secure pervasive healthcare

Mobile cloud computing is a promising technology for pervasive healthcare, which guarantees real-time health monitoring and electronic medical records sharing in different environments. In this paper, we present a hierarchical mobile cloud computing framework with three layers for pervasive healthcare. The scalable and hierarchical mobile cloud framework can be used to disperse the global storage and management load. We also study the social characteristics among patients and divide the patients into different social groups for privacy protection. A secure electronic medical records sharing scheme and a real-time health information transmission scheme are proposed. The security analysis shows that our schemes not only provide secure communication but also protect privacy of the patients.