Doctors could keep better tabs on their patients between visits with a simple wave of a magic wand-like device being developed at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
The prototype, dubbed “Wanda,” is part of a multi-university project to develop ways to protect patient confidentiality as healthcare increasingly moves out of hospitals and doctors’ offices and into the home. However, beyond safety, simplicity is also a key goal, said doctoral student Tim Pierson, Wanda’s creator.
“Quite frequently in the computer security business, we invent things that are super-secure, but hard to use, and people do not understand them,” he said. “We set out to make something that my parents and in-laws could use.”
Here is how Wanda could work: A doctor sends a patient home with a Wi-Fi-enabled blood pressure cuff. Instead of having to type in a passcode to connect the monitor to a home Wi-Fi network, the patient just points the wand at the device.
Once that connection is made, blood pressure readings can be transmitted back to the doctor’s office.
The prototype consists of a ruler with two antennas attached to it. It can acquire a network name and password by being plugged into a Wi-Fi router, and is then detached and pointed at the medical device to connect it to the network. The password information is converted into binary code — ones and zeroes — with one antenna transmitting information packets containing the “ones,” while the other sends the “zeroes.”
As the medical device is close to the wand, it can tell which packet came from which antenna based on the signal strength and can reconstruct the information. However, a hacker farther away would not be able to tell the difference.
“One of the good things about this system is that the user does not even have to know that information. The wand can get it from your Wi-Fi router and impart it on the device,” Pierson said. “We talked to a lot of people who have Wi-Fi in their homes and have no idea what their password is.”
Researchers elsewhere have tried similar approaches using sound to transmit a secret key that allows devices to be paired, or accelerometers that pair devices if they are shaken, Pierson said. One drawback of those approaches is that they require some kind of extra sensor or equipment to be included in the medical device.
Pierson’s project is part a US$10 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Michigan and Vanderbilt University.
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