Deep Q-Learning-Based Neural Network with Privacy Preservation Method for Secure Data Transmission in Internet of Things (IoT) Healthcare Application

Nirmala Devi Kathamuthu, Annadurai Chinnamuthu, Nelson Iruthayanathan, Manikandan Ramachandran, Amir H. Gandomi

The healthcare industry is being transformed by the Internet of Things (IoT), as it provides wide connectivity among physicians, medical devices, clinical and nursing staff, and patients to simplify the task of real-time monitoring. As the network is vast and heterogeneous, opportunities and challenges are presented in gathering and sharing information. Focusing on patient information such as health status, medical devices used by such patients must be protected to ensure safety and privacy. Healthcare information is confidentially shared among experts for analyzing healthcare and to provide treatment on time for patients. Cryptographic and biometric systems are widely used, including deep-learning (DL) techniques to authenticate and detect anomalies, andprovide security for medical systems. As sensors in the network are energy-restricted devices, security and efficiency must be balanced, which is the most important concept to be considered while deploying a security system based on deep-learning approaches. Hence, in this work, an innovative framework, the deep Q-learning-based neural network with privacy preservation method (DQ-NNPP), was designed to protect data transmission from external threats with less encryption and decryption time. This method is used to process patient data, which reduces network traffic. This process also reduces the cost and error of communication. Comparatively, the proposed model outperformed some standard approaches, such as thesecure and anonymous biometric based user authentication scheme (SAB-UAS), MSCryptoNet, and privacy-preserving disease prediction (PPDP). Specifically, the proposed method achieved accuracy of 93.74%, sensitivity of 92%, specificity of 92.1%, communication overhead of 67.08%, 58.72 ms encryption time, and 62.72 ms decryption time.