Tag Archives: security

The Amulet Project Comes to a Close

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The Amulet project launched in late 2013 with the vision of “bridging the gap between the type of pervasive computing possible with a mobile phone and that enabled by wearable computing.” Now, almost 10 years, 51 publications, and 29 core members (along with many collaborators) later, Amulet is coming to a close.

Amulet was featured in Forbes magazine, has been presented to audiences at many conferences and at an mHealth summit near Washington DC, was evaluated on usability in a study amongst rural older adults with obesity, and is impacting continued health research!

Many of our students have gone on to roles in industry and academia after graduation, and Ryan Halter, the Dartmouth co-PI on the project, co-founded a startup company, SynchroHealth, with technology originating in the Amulet project.

The Amulet prototype remains available (open source, open hardware) on GitHub, and our papers are available through our Zotero library.

We thank the countless number of people who have supported the project — from advisors, to NSF program officers, to graduate and undergraduate students, to study participants, to project leads, and to you all who have kept up with the project for its 10-year run.

Cryptographic transfer of sensor data from the Amulet to a smartphone

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David Harmon ’17 develops and evaluates a novel protocol for secure transfer of sensor data from an Amulet to a smartphone, in this Senior Honors Thesis released as a Dartmouth Computer Science Technical Report.

Abstract. The authenticity, confidentiality, and integrity of data streams from wearable healthcare devices are critical to patients, researchers, physicians, and others who depend on this data to measure the effectiveness of treatment plans and clinical trials. Many forms of mHealth data are highly sensitive; in the hands of unintended parties such data may reveal indicators of a patient’s disorder, disability, or identity. Furthermore, if a malicious party tampers with the data, it can affect the diagnosis or treatment of patients, or the results of a research study. Although existing network protocols leverage encryption for confidentiality and integrity, network-level encryption does not provide end-to-end security from the device, through the smartphone and database, to downstream data consumers. In this thesis we provide a new open protocol that provides end-to-end authentication, confidentiality, and integrity for healthcare data in such a pipeline.

We present and evaluate a prototype implementation to demonstrate this protocol’s feasibility on low-power wearable devices, and present a case for the system’s ability to meet critical security properties under a specific adversary model and trust assumptions.

Advisor: David Kotz.

Emily Greene wins NCWIT Collegiate Award Honorable Mention

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Congratulations to Emily Greene, an undergraduate in the Amulet group, who received Honorable Mention for the NCWIT Collegiate Award from the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). Emily is spending this week at the NCWIT Summit on Women and IT in Tucson, Arizona.

Here is her video submission, which describes a cryptographically-supported mechanism for selective sharing of streams of mHealth data, such as those that would be produced by Amulet applications.