A Testbed for Implementing Lightweight Physical Layer Security in an IoT-based Health Monitoring System

Abstract

Telemedicine is a technique that allows patients to have health-related consultations without the need to be physically present in the hospital through phone and video calling technologies. In recent years, researchers have made many contributions to reform and facilitate better telemedicine services through the use of body area networks or wireless body area networks. This paper presents a testbed where we implement a lightweight physical layer security scheme, using gray code, on an IoT-based health monitoring system to secure transmitted patient readings while preserving its clinical features. We address several existing adversarial scenarios, where an adversary can eavesdrop on the packets and infer their content using some of the existing packet inspection techniques. We prove that the introduced physical layer security scheme effectively protects the patient transmitted data, even if read by an adversary.