ABSTRACT
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).
ABSTRACT
Digital health (eHealth) represents the future of the healthcare sector. Although the digitalization of services and processes related to the health sphere has been coveted for a long time, the emergency caused by COVID-19 has marked a turning point in this sense. The fifth generation (5G) network paradigms are good candidates to meet some of the current requirements of eHealth services, however, researchers are already projected towards sixth generation (6G) and are working on proposals on how breakthrough trends and technologies can improve performance in health data communication and processing. It is worth emphasizing that, in the management of such sensitive data, security and trustworthiness of devices involved in the network cannot in any way be underestimated. On the basis of these considerations, this paper proposes an innovative trust model for the selection of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices responsible for transmitting health data. The data possibly detected and transmitted by medical sensors often includes multimedia data, such as the lung sound detected on a remotely monitored patient with COVID-19. This paper also provides a collection of works of literature that propose trust-based solutions for the security of eHealth services in order to illustrate the current state of the art in which the proposed model fits. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world. Today, the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in support of education, medicine, business and administration has become a reality practically everywhere. In particular, the eHealth (digital Health) sector is on the cusp of a revolution, fueled by the worldwide health emergency due to the spread of the new coronavirus. With a view to developing new sixth generation (6G)-oriented architectures, advanced eHealth services like telemonitoring would benefit from the support of technologies that guarantee secure data access, ultra-low latency and very-high reliability targets, which are hardly achievable by the fifth generation (5G). This is the reason why this work proposes an eHealth system architecture, in which low-latency enabling technologies like Device-to-Device (D2D) communications and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) are integrated and supported by security mechanisms for an optimal management of sensitive health data collected by Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices. A preliminary evaluation of the proposed framework is provided that shows promising results in terms of data security and latency reduction. IEEE