Protecting anonymity in wireless medical monitoring environments

Advances in sensor networks and mobile technologies enable the provision of improved medical services through monitoring of patients; however by recording continuously location data there is an increased privacy risk. Recording user related data requires the creation of appropriate privacy preserving policies, which often depend on the good intention of the data collector. Since it is often feasible for a malicious or negligent data provider to expose these data to an unauthorized user, one solution is to protect the patient's privacy by making difficult a linkage between specific measurements with patient's identity. In this paper we present a privacy preserving architecture which builds upon the concept of k-anonymity. While patient vital parameters can be constantly recorded with the use of sensor networks and critical events produce alerts that are notifying the medical personnel, we prevent an outsider to link the signals received with the identity of the user carrying the sensor. The collected data cannot be further used for identification of diseases or other important questions.