Trust based Adaptive Safety for Sensor Networks in e-Health

Wireless pervasive computing devices are rapidly penetrating our environments, where e-Health is among the most critical ones. In the e-Health environment it is not only important to address security and privacy issues (which are usually in the focus), but also safety needs for appropriate treatment. Now taking into account that an increasing proportion of pervasive (smart dust) devices go on the account of such devices that lack computing power, security, privacy and safety provisioning in such environments turns out to be a demanding task - not to mention additional requirement about their adaptive provisioning. However, some ten years ago an interesting research branch in computing domain appeared, called trust management. This branch is turning out to be a very handy alternative to support traditional hard security and privacy approaches. It is therefore often referred to as soft security (privacy) provisioning mechanism. As trust is inherently adaptive and as security and safety are much related, this paper presents a new approach where trust management is deployed in e-Health settings to enable adaptive safety provisioning. Last but not least, this paper also introduces a trustworthiness calculation framework that extends trust management methods.