Cyber Security for Personal Medical Devices Internet of Things

Personal Medical Devices (PMDs) are attached to the patient's body to assist his physiological processes and to monitor his medical condition. These PMDs communicate with programming devices for various reasons like monitoring, firmware update, and operational parameter updates. With wider proliferation of PMDs, their communication and connectivity features will improve enabling greater mobility for the patient. The PMDs will essentially become part of the Internet of Things (IoTs) for medical devices providing almost seemless communication capabilities. This will expose the PMDs to new cyber threats. In this paper, we present the cyber threats to these devices and limitations of the PMD IoTs that make addressing these cyber threats challenging. We then present some initial solution approaches to address the identified cyber threats.