With more care shifting from hospital or clinic to home, the technology to support care also is moving in that direction — as is the threat of hackers.
In an effort to help patients configure home medical devices and to protect related healthcare data from security risks, a group from Dartmouth College has developed a digital “magic wand” for securely connecting devices to Wi-Fi networks. It may have wider applicability as well.
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This gadget, dubbed Wanda, is a small, wand-like gadget with two antennas that are one-half wavelength apart. Wanda is housed in a USB port at the Wi-Fi access point. When it’s time to connect a new device, the user points the wand toward the device to beam secret network information.
The wand also provides secure codes for transferring data to medical devices on the network.
“People love this new approach to connecting devices to Wi-Fi,” Wanda developer Tim Pierson, a doctoral student at Dartmouth said in a statement from the school. “Many of our volunteer testers remarked on the frustration they’ve encountered when configuring wireless devices at home and ask when they can take our wand home.”
Pierson will present Wanda at INFOCOM, the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, in April. He and his research team released a prepublication version of their paper on Friday.
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Wanda is is part of a National Science Foundation-funded project called Trustworthy Health and Wellness (THaW). The THaW coalition also includes Johns Hopkins University, the University of Illinois, University of Michigan and Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management.
“We anticipate our Wanda technology being useful in a wide variety of applications, not just healthcare, and for a wide range of device management tasks, not just Wi-Fi network configuration,” added Dartmouth computer science professor David Kotz.
Photo: Dartmouth College
