Transmission Complete? Addressing the Challenges in Healthcare Tech
By Dr. Yongge Wang
Faculty Member, School of STEM at American Public University
Emerging technologies, such as proactive healthcare monitoring networks, provide the opportunity to address several healthcare challenges. Healthcare monitoring network technology also introduces challenges that we must address before it can be widely deployed.
The first wearable system for medical purposes can be traced back to the first recorded instance of eyeglasses in 1268. Since then, many experiments have been done to enhance human capabilities. For example, Robert Hooke called for augmented senses in 1665: “the adding of artificial Organs to the natural” and non-electric and electric hearing aids have been developed since the 1800s. Vannevar Bush proposed the idea of a “memex” as an enlarged intimate supplement to individuals’ memory. In 1977, Collins developed a head-mounted camera that converted images into a tactile grid on a vest as a visual prosthetic for the blind.
In a future wearable healthcare network scenario, a patient’s physiological conditions may be regularly transmitted to doctors and caregivers and alert messages may be sent to his or her family members when critical situations occur.
Doctors may also do some diagnostic analysis on the received information and instruct the patient’s wearable medical devices to function according to the patient’s physiological conditions (e.g., to save the patient’s life during critical events).
Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), an individual’s health and medical information is private and protected. Protected information includes (but is not limited to) the information that doctors, nurses, and other health care providers put in medical records, conversations about the treatment that doctors have with nurses and others, information contained in health insurer’s computer systems, and billing information at clinics.
In a distributed healthcare network, it is more difficult to protect the patient’s information and to comply with HIPPA rules. In addition to posing a risk to patient privacy, wearable healthcare networks also raise questions about the identification of human intention and potential mind-control.
James Mackenzie invented the polygraph tool (lie detector) to accurately identify human intention by analyzing a range of physiological conditions such as heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, and skin conductance during the time a person is questioned. Similar techniques could be used for other purposes as well.
By using the physiological data collected from wearable healthcare sensors, one may be able to identify the intention of a person during a specific time period. This is against current ethics and regulations, but we cannot assume everyone s will follow the rules. Furthermore, doctors (and malicious attackers) may remotely send instructions to the patient’s wearable medical devices to influence his or her meta states such as stress, excitement, attention, and others. The change of these states could an impact on the patient’s mood and decisions on certain issues at that moment.
It should be noted that the mind control phenomenon in healthcare networks has different meaning from the political term ”mind control” or “brainwashing” which refers to coercive persuasion. In the traditional healthcare model, patients trust their doctors with their health related information and are satisfied with the existing privacy protection mechanisms for medical information systems.
In the new model of healthcare networks, patients have to trust their physiological data receivers in other domains also. If patients’ wearable medical devices can receive real-time instructions from doctors, they also have to trust their physicians to not maliciously control their physiological conditions.
In addition, patients need to have absolute trust in the security mechanisms for the healthcare networks. Many people may tolerate the accidental disclosure of their medical records, but no one can tolerate the fact that a malicious attacker has the potential to break into the healthcare network to identify their intention and to control their mind in real-time. Without a satisfactory solution to these challenges, patients may hesitate to adopt this advanced technology.
In particular, patients need to know what kind of human intention one can infer from the physiological data transmitted from their wearable medical devices, what kind of instructions doctors could send to these devices to control their physiological conditions, and what kind of potential impact on their minds these instructions may have. Further physiological study on the potentials of mind control and identification from human meta states are necessary to answer these questions.
If patients have a clear understanding of all potentials and risks, they can make a decision on what kind of data should be transferred to whom and what kind of instructions their medical devices should accept in different environments. Furthermore, new laws may need to be established to protect patients’ privacy regarding human minds.
About the Author
Dr. Yongge Wang received his PhD from Heidelberg University, Germany in 1996. Since then Dr. Wang spent a few years in industry such as Certicom which is a division of RIM until he joined UNC Charlotte. Dr. Wang has done research in the cyber-security and cryptography for more than 20 years.
