wilamowski-b-m-irwin-j-d-industrial-communication-systems-2011

30-12 Industrial Communication Systems
communication networks, providing environment and inhabitant monitoring and locating frequently
lost objects. This system is also supported on Bluetooth communication technology. The following section
presents some issues regarding the application of communications in healthcare environments, as well as
the corresponding challenges.
30.6 Issues and Challenges
Over the years, standard industrial communications have been integrated in healthcare equipment
for networking support. In consequence, medical and industrial communications share a significant
range of features and problems in areas like security, privacy, safety, reliability, and timeliness. Current
endeavors in the standardization of different medical communications are also expected to improve the
interoperability of communication devices from different manufacturers.
30.6.1 Security and Privacy
Nowadays, security and privacy are two critical concerns, not only for the direct implications of their
violation but also because their support, in many healthcare applications, is an open research area.
Wireless communications are becoming very popular among home networking applications given their
low-cost installation, aesthetics, flexibility, and reconfiguration capabilities [46]. However, they are
more exposed to security and privacy breaches than their wired counterparts.
Bergstrom et al. [47] state that, to ensure security, a network must provide confidentiality, authentication,
authorization, and integrity. Confidentiality is concerned with the possibility of third parties
being able to read the transmitted messages in the network while authentication relates with
the concern that somebody may masquerade as a legitimate operator of the system. The system’s
integrity can be corrupted when an attacker modifies system data or commands. This can occur,
when, for example, a malicious user is able to tamper with data by gaining access to the system
using false or pirated authorizations. Another important aspect is privacy, not only from the trust
perspective [48] but also from an ethical point of view [49], i.e., patients have human rights and civil
liberties that must be respected. An example illustrating the multiple dimensions of privacy is the
monitoring of elderly people where privacy can be interpreted in a perspective of maintaining personal
data secure (inaccessible to third parties) or respecting the right to intimacy of elderly people.
These perspectives should be taken into account in the development of legislation concerning the
protection of privacy.
30.6.2 Safety and Reliability
The support of safety in healthcare environments is a domain often regarded as solely relying on security
and the protection of privacy. However, it is dependent on a broader spectrum of scenarios: system misuse,
software bugs, hardware malfunctions, interference on communications, etc. If a user has the ability
to perform a given set of actions (commands), among them commands that require human intervention
for completion or continuous operation, he/she may utilize the system improperly and cause damage
not only to the equipment but also to himself or someone nearby (e.g., patient). Another scenario arises
from software bugs or hardware malfunctions. In this case, the system has no predictable behavior and
can damage the medical equipment and injure its users. Since a lot of healthcare equipment use buses
for communicating data, they may work on unpredictable states due to network malfunctions caused
by electromagnetic interference (EMI) from nearby equipment [50]. In order to improve the reliability
of wireless medical device networks (WMDN), Gehlot and Sloane [51] propose a WMDN verification
and validation toolkit (V2T) that allows warranting safe and reliable WMDN operation. However, due
to the broad range of component manufacturers, device models, and user configurations, the support of
universally safe and reliable WMDN systems is still in an early stage of development.
© 2011 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC