Security Issues in Biomedical Wireless Sensor Networks

Within the hospital or extended care environment, there is an overwhelming need for constant monitoring of vital body functions and support for patient mobility. Tomorrow's biomedical networks will address these needs by incorporating new technologies like wireless sensor networks into their infrastructure. However, wireless transmission of sensitive patient data presents some obvious security concerns. In this paper we discuss these concerns and how they are addressed by existing systems. We also discuss issues that need further consideration, such as run-time composition of security services depending on the criticality of data transmitted along with a solution for practical sensor systems using TinyOS. Finally, we propose intrusion detection as a future research direction for biomedical sensor networks and we elaborate on the main components of such a system.