Management of Multiple Data Streams in Sensor Networks for Medicine

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the privacy aware management of data streams generated by wireless sensor networks (WSN) in medical applications. Such data are primarily used to ensure the direct health support for a specific patient. They can also be used for other purposes, like quality assurance of applied devices and comparative evaluation research of medical treatments. Considering the novelty of the WSN-based medical application, every information helping to improve the service is extremely useful. As privacy in medicine is an important issue, care should be taken to harmonize the legal requirements with the medical necessities. Data used for different purposes have different characteristics, different users and different access rules. Therefore the raw data stream has to be split and processed (condensed, anonymized, etc.) in various ways dependent on the use. The access to data has to defined differently for different output data streams.