1st International Workshop on Evolution of Social Media in Mobile Healthcare

The increasing utility of social media is a continuous improvisation to take the benefits of information sharing and connectivity among individuals. The utility further improves when social media is used in the areas like healthcare applications where socially integrated healthcare applications are getting familiarity. The integration of the healthcare application with social media provide ease of use, robustness, efficiency, reliability, resilience, and adaptability to the healthcare applications. Socially integrated mobile healthcare applications use wireless sensors to gather patient data, however this setup orients some vulnerabilities which can be categorized as: privacy, security and legal issues, and active and passive attacks. The attackers can cause much harm to the process by malicious attempts such as data modification, impersonation, eavesdropping and replaying. The primary purpose of these attacks is to steal the patient’s data, which is not only valuable but also private and sensitive. In some cases, implanted devices are used to administer drugs (such as insulin), and attacks could lead to serious outcomes for the patient if the administration of drugs is compromised. If the security issues with the healthcare applications are not resolved in a timely fashion, the impact may be catastrophic and may also cause the rise of socio-technical problems.