Secure Electronic Healthcare Records Distribution in Wireless Environments Using Low Resource Devices

The continuous growth of wireless technologies introduces a paradigm shift in the way information may be treated. Especially in the medical domain, Information Systems may gain benefits from the utilization of wireless devices which gain continuously in terms of resources. Existing legislation in US and EU countries introduces a lot of new challenges. Above all else, the information exchanged should be encrypted, and verified to reach the intended recipient. The authors of this chapter discuss the challenges hindering the efforts to disseminate in an accurate and secure manner medical information over wireless infrastructures. They present based on the results of two projects partially funded by the EU, an architecture that allows secure dissemination of electronic healthcare records. The chapter presents the architecture based on software agent technologies and enables query and authentication mechanisms in a transparent to the user manner. The chapter also discusses the security oriented choices of the approach and argues based on experimentation that the architecture efficiently supports a sufficient number of users.