To improve the usability during the pairing procedure as well
as the protection against passive eavesdropping and man-inthe-middle
(MITM) attacks the simple secure pairing (SSP)
mechanism has been added to the Bluetooth specification v2.1 +
EDR [16] and its successor versions. One method of SSP called
Out of Band (OOB) uses an additional carrier to automatically
exchange the pairing information. In [17], a concept is presented
to bypass the Bluetooth device/service discovery by using radio
frequency identification (RFID) tags. Similar approaches are
pursued by the connection handover specification from the near-
field communication (NFC) Forum [18].
2) NFC: NFC is a wireless connectivity technology evolving
from a combination of contactless identification and common
networking technologies. Physical link is based on magnetic
inductive coupling as used in other RFID standards like
ISO14443. Besides peer-to-peer communication between two
devices, an NFC device can switch between reader/writer mode
as well as tag-emulation mode. When integrated into a mobile
phone with mobile data services, these three modes allow for a
broad range of new applications [19]. In the recent past, a number
of trials and research projects have been conducted focusing
on the usage of NFC in ticketing and payment applications as
well as social networking and location-based services [20]–[22].
The short communication range is the major feature of this
technology, since communication between two NFC enabled
devices occurs when they are brought within a few centimeters
to each other. This physical proximity of the device to the reader
gives users the reassurance of being in control of the process.
These properties render NFC suitable to act as PAN/BAN interface
in the field of mHealth [23]. Due to NFCs broad application
area even in medical applications, the NFC forum initiated the
development of a technical specification for personal health device
communications based on NFC [18].
In [24], a telemonitoring system is outlined that employs NFC
technology for the entire patient equipment. It utilizes NFCenabled
mobile phones as AHD, ID cards based on contactless
smartcards to identify patients, and medical sensor devices to
be interrogated by the mobile phone. For this reason, medical
sensor devices like blood pressure meter and body weight scales
have been enabled with NFC technology to provide the recent
measured value set. The entire procedure of data acquisition
can be performed without any key press. A Java 2 Micro Edition
(J2ME) application installed on the mobile phone launches
automatically by simply touching the ID card and guides the patient
through the touch-based data acquisition process. Besides,
interrogating medical sensor devices users are touching passive
RFID tags with imprinted icons to acquire nonquantitative data
like wellbeing or to answer questions presented on the phone’s
display.
One problem that this NFC-based system faced so far was
the acquisition of a huge amount of data either in case of realtime
transmission (i.e., ECG stream) or reading out a device’s
memory. Hundreds of kilobytes or even megabytes may take
quite long if transmitted via NFC and would oblige the user to
steadily keep the mobile phone close to the NFC-enabled sensor
device as long as data are transmitted. In order to integrate a realtime
streaming ECG sensor to the existing system, the usage of
a communication protocol with wider range such as Bluetooth