Protecting senior citizens from cyber security attacks in the e-health scenario: An international perspective

Senior citizens represent a substantial percentage of population around the world and most of them need health care. Health care is becoming expensive around the world. As one of the cost-reduction measures, most of the health care providers are moving the patient's data into electronic format (Electronic Medical Records). Even though this migration is necessary for efficient health care service, it opens up a big can of worms with respect to security and privacy issues. In particular, when the doctors and patients access this medical information through the Internet, there is a large room for cyber security attacks. Given that the senior citizens have less resources (memory, physical energy, technical skills), developing solutions and processes, that will help them in not becoming a victim to attacks, is essential. The problem becomes more interesting when the international component comes into play - e.g., senior citizens in another country. In this research, we plan to study the social and cultural effect of using electronic health care services, and cyber security attacks due to using e-health care services. This environment of studying the cyber security issues for senior citizens, e.g., in India, presents challenges and opportunities compared to the U.S. We believe that this research will lead into developing solutions that will address cyber security problems for senior citizens both in India and in the U.S. This paper lays the foundation for research rather than a specific solution or technology or research results.