Enabling Clustering for Privacy-Aware Data Dissemination Based on Medical Healthcare-IoTs (MH-IoTs) for Wireless Body Area Network

There is a need to develop an effective data preservation scheme with minimal information loss when the patient’s data are shared in public interest for different research activities. Prior studies have devised different approaches for data preservation in healthcare domains; however, there is still room for improvement in the design of an elegant data preservation approach. With that motivation behind, this study has proposed a medical healthcare-IoTs-based infrastructure with restricted access. The infrastructure comprises two algorithms. The first algorithm protects the sensitivity information of a patient with quantifying minimum information loss during the anonymization process. The algorithm has also designed the access polices comprising the public access, doctor access, and the nurse access, to access the sensitivity information of a patient based on the clustering concept. The second suggested algorithm is K-anonymity privacy preservation based on local coding, which is based on cell suppression. This algorithm utilizes a mapping method to classify the data into different regions in such a manner that the data of the same group are placed in the same region. The benefit of using local coding is to restrict third-party users, such as doctors and nurses, when trying to insert incorrect values in order to access real patient data. Efficiency of the proposed algorithm is evaluated against the state-of-the-art algorithm by performing extensive simulations. Simulation results demonstrate benefits of the proposed algorithms in terms of efficient cluster formation in minimum time, minimum information loss, and execution time for data dissemination.