Patient Empowerment in IoT for eHealth: How to Deal With Lost Keys

Abstract

The rise of internet of things (IoT) in medicine has generated tons of new data through connected devices. Medicine and research in medicine are interested in using those data for the personalization of patients' treatment. The authors present the system MIDATA where patients can transfer their medical IoT data and store them. They have also the possibility to share those data with research groups. The solution respects patient privacy. Even an administrator of the site cannot access to the data of the patients. The patient can choose which users can decrypt their data. But users will lose their passwords and keys. So, the authors provide a novel solution for the recovery of the keys. This procedure has different levels: the patient has a new phone but remembers the password; the patient has forgotten the password but can use the phone; and the worst case is when the patient forgot the password and lost the phone, where they developed a novel solution for key recovery.