Lead Institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst

Project Leader: Kevin Fu

Research Progress

• Abstract
  Researchers in security and privacy have been using poor torso simulators (phantoms) to approximate a human tissue for implantable devices. This effort aims at steering the security community towards standards accepted by the biomedical community.

• Focus of the research/Market need for this project
  Research projects in security and privacy for medical devices have used poor in vitro torso simulators, which may not yield good results when tried in vivo. At least 6 major papers since the seminal pacemaker work in 2008 have used food grade meat instead of calibrated saline solution baths as specified by accepted standards in the biomedical field. The results may not translate well in actual deployment with real human tissue.

• Project Aims/Goals
  This project aims at describing the challenges of reproducing results with improper simulators and outlining the benefits of using a calibrated saline solution following accepted standards.

• Key Conclusions/Significant Findings/Milestones reached/Deliverables
  The variability of measurements using food grade meat for electromagnetic interference experiments was significant. The reduction in noise using a saline phantom was appreciable and illustrate the recommendation for calibrated simulators. Final manuscript for submission to HealthTech 2014.

  

• Materials Available for Other Investigators/interested parties
  Our publications point to the standard and resources containing the design of the phantom, which is publicly available.

• Market entry strategies
  Outreach to security community via blog post and other media.

Bibliography
SoK: Security and Privacy in Implantable Medical Devices and Body Area Networks
Michael Rushanan, Colleen Swanson, Denis Foo Kune, and Aviel D. Rubin
Proceedings of the 35th Annual IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2014

Recent Results in Computer Security for Medical Devices
Shane S. Clark and Kevin Fu
International ICST Conference on Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare (MobiHealth), Special Session on Advances in Wireless Implanted Devices, October 2011