Pervasive Health Care Applications Face Tough Security Challenges

1536-1268/02/$17.00 © 2002 IEEE N ational health expenditures this year are estimated at about US$1.5 trillion, or almost 15 percent of GDP, by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (www.cms.gov). This comprises the largest service sector in the US economy. Moreover, cost increases are outpacing general inflation, so the health care industry is again under pressure to become more efficient. These pressures—coupled with ready availability of personal digital assistants, wireless connectivity, mobility management middleware, and numerous medical applications—are driving very rapid deployment of pervasive computing solutions in health care. But as this article will show, these deployments must meet increasingly stringent privacy and security requirements that will be enforced in the coming year and beyond.