ABSTRACT
Privacy and security are unavoidable challenges in the future of smart health services and systems. Several approaches for preserving privacy have been provided in the Internet of Health Things (IoHT) applications. However, with the emergence of COVID-19, the healthcare centers needed to track, collect, and share more critical data such as the location of those infected and monitor social distancing. Unfortunately, the traditional privacy-preserving approaches failed to deal effectively with emergency circumstances. In the proposed research, we introduce a Tokens Shuffling Approach (TSA) to preserve collected data's privacy, security, and reliability during the pandemic without the need to trust a third party or service providers. TSA depends on a smartphone application and the proposed protocol to collect and share data reliably and safely. TSA depends on a proposed algorithm for swapping the identities temporarily between cooperated users and then hiding the identities by employing fog nodes. The fog node manages the cooperation process between users in a specific area to improve the system's performance. Finally, TSA uses blockchain to save data reliability, ensure data integrity, and facilitate access. The results prove that TSA performed better than traditional approaches regarding data privacy and the performance level. Further, we noticed that it adapted better during emergency circumstances. Moreover, TSA did not affect the accuracy of the collected data or its related statistics. On the contrary, TSA will not affect the quality of primary healthcare services. © 2022 by the authors.
ABSTRACT
The recent global pandemics are generating serious problems in the elderly population and those who suffer from previous ailments. When a person is infected, he / she is usually isolated from the rest of persons in his / her room to avoid transmitting the virus. In most cases, especially those who live in nursing homes, often remain in bed with difficulties in moving. So, their monitoring and control of evolution is sometimes difficult. To solve this problem, this paper presents a non-invasive wireless mobile system to monitor elderly people in nursing homes. The system is composed by an electronic device with several sensors to monitor vital signs such temperature, cough, blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation and, difficulty breathing of patients and an Android application to manage the medical data. Additionally, the system uses a local server to store the data and provide it to the nurses and physicians. Both the application and the process of collecting data have been tested together to check the correct generation of alerts and patients' labelling of degree of urgency.