Interest in using mobile technologies for health-related
applications (mHealth) has increased. However, none of the
available mobile platforms provide the essential properties
that are needed by these applications. An mHealth platform
must be (i) secure; (ii) provide high availability; and (iii) allow
for the deployment of multiple third-party mHealth applications
that share access to an individual’s devices and data.
Smartphones may not be able to provide property (ii) because
there are activities and situations in which an individual may
not be able to carry them (e.g., while in a contact sport). A
low-power wearable device can provide higher availability,
remaining attached to the user during most activities. Furthermore,
some mHealth applications require integrating multiple
on-body or near-body devices, some owned by a single individual,
but others shared with multiple individuals. In this
paper, we propose a secure system architecture for a lowpower
bracelet that can run multiple applications and manage
access to shared resources in a body-area mHealth network.
The wearer can install a personalized mix of third-party applications
to support the monitoring of multiple medical conditions
or wellness goals, with strong security safeguards. Our
preliminary implementation and evaluation supports the hypothesis
that our approach allows for the implementation of a
resource monitor on far less power than would be consumed
by a mobile device running Linux or Android. Our preliminary
experiments demonstrate that our secure architecture
would enable applications to run for several weeks on a small
wearable device without recharging.