HW/SW Implementation of a Secure Bluetooth Communication for a Health Monitoring Systems
Manel Hentati, Amel Meddeb-Makhlouf, Raida Hentati · 2024
With the significant evolution of technology, the concept of remote healthcare systems is attracting doctors, patients, and nurses. These systems allow telemedicine members to be interconnected to share data in real-time via wireless networks. It is a promising framework for remote health monitoring, offering medical services and preserving patients' lives, health, and cost. However, designing such systems faces many challenges. One major challenge is data security during transmission, which can be threatened by various attacks, posing a high risk to patients' health. In this paper, we propose an HW/SW implementation to transfer data from a board to a computer via Bluetooth communication, which is used for short-distance areas. This wireless network generally allows for less power consumption and ensures no data loss. Our approach includes five levels of security services: authentication, integrity, confidentiality, dispensability, and anti-replay. We operate on four vital signs (ECG, temperature, blood pressure, and oxygen level) from a real medical dataset. We implement an AES-256 cryptographic algorithm and the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) using an Arduino Uno board. Experiments on different data instances and a comparison with state-of-the-art methods show the high performance of the proposed approach.