Open Issues in IDS Design for Wireless Biomedical Sensor Networks

Wearable sensor devices play a key role for the wide adoption of pervasive and continuous healthcare monitoring systems. A first generation of wearable devices was represented by e-textile. A new generation of devices is instead represented by the so called Biomedical Wireless Sensor Networks (BWSN), that is ad-hoc networks of wireless devices deployed on (or in proximity of) the patients, e.g. in the form of sticking plasters, sensing various biomedical parameters and routing such values toward a datawarehousing system. While BWSNs result in a non-intrusive and flexible solution for continuous patient monitoring, they also introduce new challenges in preserving privacy and security of the collected sensitive data. In this paper we present an overview of BWSN related security issues and discuss the main approaches used to cope with them. In particular we analyze how Intrusion Detection Systems designed to protect generic Wireless Sensor Networks must be customized to be useful in the healthcare field. We also propose some modification to the applied IDS to better fit BWSN specific requirements and identify limits of the proposed approach paving the way for future work. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.