A knowledgeable security model for distributed health information systems
Section snippets
Introduction and motivation
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”. This is Mark Weiser's vision (Weiser, 2001) of how technologies might eventually blend in with our surroundings. Projecting this vision on to healthcare gives a picture wherein “smart” software agents would act on behalf of human specialists in collecting/monitoring critical life support data, extracting information from the data, jigsawing
Security requirements of healthcare information systems
We shall, in the beginning, draw distinctions between the types of threats imposed on healthcare systems and their likelihood. Though eavesdropping or hacking is a major concern to computer network security, it is so expensive that dedicated and capable intruders may consider using a more convenient way. Actually, 10% of GPs (general practitioners) in the UK have experienced their computers being physically stolen (Pitchford and Kay, 1995). More likely, improper use of the system may lead to
Enhancing security in distributed healthcare
In fulfilling the requirements discussed in the previous section, we investigated a process calculus based messaging service that allows us to fragment and distribute clinical guidelines and protocols and a high-level knowledge representation paradigm to address knowledge/semantics interoperability issues. In the following, we first review existing approaches aiming at secure pervasive healthcare environments. We continue with a layered model and a brief discussion of its enabling technologies.
Security in HealthAgents: a comprehensive case study
In this section, we present in-depth details of the HealthAgents system, the elicitation of interaction models, and their secure running in our layered security model for distributed healthcare applications. Meanwhile, as discussed in the previous section, our vision in secure pervasive healthcare systems relies on a mutual understanding of the case at hand. We elaborate an ontology and a conceptual graph based mechanism that work alongside with LCC interaction models.
Conclusions and discussion
In this paper, we have analysed the general security requirements for clinical information systems and developed a layered security model, illustrated by its application to the HealthAgents system but which is also applicable to other healthcare systems. The interaction models being built will run upon our OpenKnowledge framework where agents are able to execute LCC protocols for interactions. Resource manager agents will govern the resource requests against the LCC constraints, reflecting
Acknowledgements
This work is supported under the HealthAgents and OpenKnowledge STREP projects funded by EU Framework 6 under Grants: IST-FP6-027214 and IST-FP6-027253.
Dr. Liang Xiao is a Postdoc Research Fellow in the HRB Centre for Primary Care Research at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), and joined the Centre in January 2009. Before coming to Ireland, Dr. Xiao was a Research Fellow in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton in England. His research activities in Southampton included working on the EU Framework 6 projects of HealthAgents and OpenKnowledge. He obtained his BSc at the Huazhong University
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Cited by (0)
Dr. Liang Xiao is a Postdoc Research Fellow in the HRB Centre for Primary Care Research at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), and joined the Centre in January 2009. Before coming to Ireland, Dr. Xiao was a Research Fellow in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton in England. His research activities in Southampton included working on the EU Framework 6 projects of HealthAgents and OpenKnowledge. He obtained his BSc at the Huazhong University of Science & Technology in China, his MSc at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and PhD at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland.
He has worked in the telecommunications industry as a Software Engineer following his graduation in China. His experience on solving real domain problems has stimulated his research interests in the area of Software Engineering in Edinburgh and Queen's. Specifically, his research work focuses on Software Adaptivity, Model Driven Architecture, and Agent-oriented Software Engineering. Later he applies his IT expertises into the healthcare domain in Southampton, where he and his colleagues developed a secure software framework for knowledge-intensive clinical decision support system. The results of his research have been published at many international conferences and journals.
Dr. Bo Hu is a researcher at SAP Research CEC Belfast. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen in 2004. Between 2002 and 2008, he worked as a Research Fellow in the Intelligence, Agent, Multimedia Group (IAM), School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton. During his days in Southampton, he was actively involved in UK EPSRC Advanced Knowledge Technology IRC and EU FP6 projects. His main research interest is in Knowledge Management (KM), KM in pervasive computing environments, Semantic Web, Web 2.0 and their applications in e-learning and e-healthcare.
Dr. Madalina Croitoru was born in Iasi, Romania in 1980. In June 2002 she graduated from FII with a thesis on Lineage in Data Warehousing. In October 2002 she started a part time PhD with the Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen while also working as a part time Teaching Assistant. Her research looked at improving Conceptual Graph applicability in Artificial Intelligence. After graduation she started working as a Research Fellow for the Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton involved, part time, in two projects: HealthAgents and Open Knowledge. From September 2008 she started work at University Montpellier II as an Assistant Professor.
Paul Lewis is a Professor of Computer Science in University of Southampton. His main research interests are currently centred on the broad area of multimedia knowledge management. In particular he and his research team are addressing problems in image and video processing and analysis, multimedia annotation and semantic description of media. They are designing and developing novel facilities for multimedia information retrieval, navigation and browsing with a wide range of applications. The research is building on ideas from low level media processing, knowledge management and emerging semantic web technologies.
Dr. Srinandan Dasmahapatra is a lecturer in University of Southampton. His research interests are stochastic dynamics of gene networks, biomolecular networks and their state spaces, algebraic geometry and regulatory dynamics, and recommender systems, information in social networks.