Allowing privacy-preserving fog computing with digital identity assurance in remote clinical services

Nowadays, there is an increasing demand for cloud-based remote clinical services, both for diagnosis and monitoring. The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically amplified this need. E-government programs should quickly go towards the expansion of this type of services, also to avoid that people (especially elderly) renounce treatment or adequate healthcare. However, to be effective, latency between IoT medical devices and the cloud should be reduced as much as possible. For this reason, fog computing appears the best approach, as part of the elaboration is moved closer to the user. However, some privacy threats arise. Indeed, these services can be delivered only based on secure digital identity and authentication systems, but the intermediate fog layer should learn nothing about the identity of users and the link among different service requests. In this paper, we propose a concrete solution to the above issue by leveraging eIDAS-compliant digital identity and by including a cryptographic protocol to provide anonymity and unlinkability of user's access to fog servers. Copyright © 2023 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

The Next Generation of eHealth: A Multidisciplinary Survey

Over the past two years, the spread of COVID-19 has spurred the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in aid of healthcare. The need to guarantee continuity to care has promoted research and industry activities aimed at developing solutions for the digitalization of the procedures to be performed to provide health services, even in emergency scenarios. Digital collection, transmission, and processing of health data represent the starting point for fulfilling this innovation process but also bring heterogeneous challenges. These motivations led to the elaboration of this work, which analyzes innovative and technological tools for the development of digital health (eHealth) through the collection of multisectoral literature, produced thanks to the cooperation of varied research groups, thus providing a multidisciplinary survey. Since digital health is expected to be one of the leading applications of the sixth-generation (6G) wireless cellular networks, this paper covers the related telecommunications aspects. Furthermore, the exploitation of artificial intelligence paradigms to elaborate massive amounts of biological data is examined. Given the extreme sensitivity of health data, this paper also investigates security and privacy issues. In particular, the main techniques and approaches to guarantee security properties (i.e., anonymity, responsibility, authentication, confidentiality, integrity, non-repudiation, and revocability) are studied. Applications involving innovative electromagnetic systems for healthcare and assisted living services are described to provide an example of an eHealth scenario leveraging ICT. Finally, the telemedicine-related regulations of the European Commission are analyzed, with particular reference to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).