CAREER: Safe and Secure Network Control for Smart and Connected Hospitals

随着无线网络的可靠性和普及性的提高，越来越多的关键系统，如车载网络、军事系统和急救系统，都依赖于无线网络。在现代医院中，无线技术将用于连接医疗、传感和计算设备，以及电子健康记录系统，以实现智能医疗应用，例如实时患者监控，这可以显著提高护理质量。研究人员已经积累了丰富的知识来设计关键系统的网络解决方案，然而，他们中的大多数人将网络设计与应用环境相隔离：考虑的应用环境非常有限，例如位置和用户身份。因此，在联网医院的医疗应用中，医疗系统的网络和安全功能通常与医疗环境紧密耦合，例如患者的生理状态和护理人员的工作流程。由于这些情境信息中的大部分通过连接的医疗设备和传感器实时可用，因此该项目解决了这一紧迫的挑战，即在安全要求下调查并将情境集成到网络控制中。如果研究成功，将降低医院有线网络的风险和部署成本，促进患者、医生和临床支持系统之间的实时和有效的信息交换，建立包含上下文信息的基础网络模型，并为不同的医疗应用提供符合其安全性和可靠性要求的网络解决方案。具体而言，这项拟议工作的智力贡献是：i）联网的医疗设备，传感器，电子健康记录和临床决策支持系统提供了关于患者和医疗程序的实时和丰富的上下文信息。我们调查的医疗上下文和医疗系统的网络和安全功能之间的关系，并创建基于上下文的网络和安全控制模型。ii）根据医疗应用的可靠性和安全性要求，我们设计和开发技术，以协调跨异构无线网络的数据收集，控制电磁干扰，配置和优化医疗设备的操作。iii）既然对医疗设备、网络和电子健康记录的可信认证对保护患者至关重要？的安全和隐私，我们设计的访问控制算法的基础上，病人的具体医疗背景。iv）为了将不同的控制解决方案集成到一个一致的系统中，我们设计了控制分析算法和工具，以静态和动态地识别隐藏的策略冲突。v）创建参考无线医疗传感器和设备测试床并将其部署到各种环境下的真实的场景中。

With the increasing reliability and pervasiveness of wireless networks, more and more critical systems such as vehicular networks, military systems, and first responder systems, rely on wireless networks. In modern hospitals, wireless technology will be used to interconnect medical, sensing, and computing devices, as well as the electronic health record system to enable smart medical applications, such as real-time patient monitoring, which can significantly improve quality of care. Researchers have accumulated abundant knowledge for designing network solutions for critical systems, however, most of them isolate the network designs from application context: very limited context of the application circumstances, e.g. location and user identity, is considered. Differently, in medical applications for connected hospitals, the network and security functionalities of medical systems are often tightly coupled with the medical context, such as patient's physiological state and caregiver's workflow. As much of those context information becomes available in real-time via connected medical devices and sensors, this project addresses this urgent challenge to investigate and integrate context into network control under safety requirements. If successful, the research results shall reduce hazards and deployment cost of wired networks in hospitals, and facilitate real-time and efficient information exchange among patients, doctors, and clinical support systems.This work establishes fundamental network models that incorporate context information, and provides networking solutions for different medical applications under their safety and reliability requirements. Specifically, the intellectual contributions of this proposed work are: i) networked medical devices, sensors, electronic health record, and clinical decision support systems provide real-time and rich contextual information about the patients and the medical procedures. We investigate the relation between the medical context and the medical systems network and security functionalities, and create context based network and security control models. ii) Under the reliability and safety requirements of medical applications, we design and develop technologies to coordinate data collection across heterogeneous wireless networks, control electromagnetic interference, configure and optimize operations of medical devices. iii) Since trustworthy authentication to medical devices, networks, and electronic health record is vital to protect patient?s safety and privacy, we design access control algorithms based on patient specific medical context. iv) To integrate different control solutions into a consistent system in various contexts, we design control analysis algorithms and tools to identify hidden policy conflicts statically and dynamically. v) A reference wireless medical sensor and device testbed is created and deployed into real scenarios under a variety of contexts.