The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is reshaping the healthcare landscape, empowering the integration of medical devices, wearables and health applications through Internet connectivity. As technology evolves and its adoption continues to grow, IoMT will drive significant enhancements in health monitoring, patient care, operational efficiency, and medical research, leading to a new era of smarter, more preventative and more personalised healthcare.
PARTICLE’s MONITOR is a smart personalised remote patient monitoring platform specifically designed for ambulance environments, thus considering the specific mobility aspects of ambulance transport. MONITOR allows the seamless collection and integration of the patient’s vital parameters from the ambulance’s connected medical devices, as well as the near real-time sharing of this information with the destination hospital. The sharing of this sensitive data acknowledges that ambulances are mobile assets that do not always experience good connectivity. As a result, the system is designed to store the collected patient data and to send it to the destination hospital as soon as adequate connectivity is established.
At the destination hospital, and while the patient is en-route, the medical team is promptly notified about the patient’s medical status and can follow its evolution during the transport, and may even assist the emergency medical technicians (EMTs) to stabilise the patient, should it be needed. Further, by knowing the patient’s condition ahead of arrival and being aware of the estimated time of arrival of the ambulance, the medical team ensures optimum resource management at the destination hospital, with respect to making the decision on the right resources and equipment to be available upon the patient’s arrival, which may also impact on the whole hospital resource management and optimisation, concerning the support to the emergency department.
PARTICLE contributes to the ENTRUST Project by providing the testbed to support the Smart Ambulance Use Case. In ambulance transports, the vehicle is equipped with a large number of connected medical devices that continuously monitor the patient’s vital signs, collecting data that is valuable for providing adequate medical assistance. In addition, the EMTs collect medically-relevant information on the patient’s condition. Today, this data is only available at the ambulance for the EMTs to monitor the patient’s status and stability during transport.
In close cooperation with the Hospital of Évora’s information system and ambulances, the Smart Ambulance Use Case will explore the cybersecurity aspects associated with the real-time exchange of the vehicle’s devices data and patient information to the Hospital of Évora, so as to keep the point-of-care medical team apprised of the patient’s status at all times. This information will support the Hospital’s medical intervention and early diagnosis and will allow for a better planning of the resources required to assist the incoming patient. Specifically, ENTRUST will address the security vulnerabilities associated with connected medical devices and the exchange of medical data between an unsecure space (i.e., the public communications network) and the secure IT infrastructure at the Hospital of Évora and will integrate different cybersecurity tools to validate how the ENTRUST System delivers superior levels of cyber protection, ensuring secure data exchange from connected medical devices, the safeguard of the hospital’s IT infrastructure and the privacy of patient data.
Building a truly network-enabled system, and allowing destination hospitals to access in near real-time patient data from ambulances, entails three specific challenges: (1) the acceptance by the destination hospitals of the patient data originated by an external source that is the ambulance, (2) the actual transmission of sensitive patient data while on-the-move and, finally, (3) the different security/privacy requirements and trust policies per destination hospitals affecting the acceptance of the patient data coming from ambulances. In the use case, it is foreseen that system components start operating erratically – either because of the network instability observed in specific geographical areas or because the CMDs’ integrity is compromised –, resulting in a downgrade in the system trust level. Hospital of Évora, being the destination hospital, may require a high level of security requirements and trust policy conformance to accept external data. If the data transmitted by the ambulance does not exhibit a high integrity level, this data is rejected by the destination hospital.
Using the ENTRUST Trust Assessment Framework, PARTICLE’s MONITOR System is informed of this rejection and will automatically upgrade the security mechanisms to ensure that the data sent by the ambulance complies with the security and trust policies of the Hospital of Évora and can be received at the destination. As a result, the ENTRUST Trust Assessment Framework empowers the establishment of trust relationships across the entire continuum to resolve the trust, security and robustness key challenges of the Smart Ambulance use case.
PARTICLE is proud to be a contributing partner to the ENTRUST Action, which brings forth highly innovative solutions to address the security, trust and robustness challenges associated with real-life operations in healthcare delivery, ensuring adequate protection to the exchange of sensitive patient data and to the hospitals’ ICT infrastructure.
For information about the ENTRUST Action see our ealier article.
