I-Corps: Smart Healthcare System Threat Analyzer

  • Funded by National Science Foundation (NSF)
  • Total publications:0 publications

Grant number: 2138301

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Key facts

  • Disease

    COVID-19
  • Start & end year

    2021
    2023
  • Known Financial Commitments (USD)

    $50,000
  • Funder

    National Science Foundation (NSF)
  • Principal Investigator

    Mohammad Rahman
  • Research Location

    United States of America
  • Lead Research Institution

    Florida International University
  • Research Priority Alignment

    N/A
  • Research Category

    Health Systems Research

  • Research Subcategory

    Health information systems

  • Special Interest Tags

    Digital Health

  • Study Type

    Non-Clinical

  • Clinical Trial Details

    N/A

  • Broad Policy Alignment

    Pending

  • Age Group

    Not Applicable

  • Vulnerable Population

    Not applicable

  • Occupations of Interest

    Not applicable

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project focuses on assessing the security of smart healthcare systems (SHSs), aiming to persuade both the manufacturers of medical devices and healthcare organizations to deploy a more secure architecture. The advent of internet-of-medical-things (IoMT) technology brings many enhancements and possibilities for SHSs by providing opportunities to collect health information and enable real-time communication, increasing the efficiency of medical sensors, and reducing the latency between disease detection and treatment. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the prevalence and need for remote and automated patient monitoring. However, with the rise of cyberattacks, secure and dependable operation of SHSs has greatly increased in importance and priority. This secure deployment seeks to directly or indirectly serve various stakeholders ranging from healthcare providers to patients. The project will explore implementation and commercialization opportunities with an initial application focus on developing security and resilient analytics for IoMT-based SHSs.

This I-Corps project develops a system to reduce the potential vulnerability of smart healthcare systems (SHSs) based on wireless sensor devices and implantable medical devices. The proposed formal threat analysis tool is designed to be applicable to any healthcare systems that use machine learning models to make real-time control decisions from continuous data feeds. The tool acquires control logic from machine learning models, supervised and unsupervised, to perform a formal synthesis of potential threats. Using a state-of-the-art method, the solution identifies possible threats using system settings and adversarial knowledge, accessibility, capability, and attack targets as inputs. Initial results suggest that the proposed technology can improve the robustness and resiliency of SHSs. The threat vectors identified by the tool can be utilized to reconfigure the SHS architecture to make it less susceptible threats.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.