skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: A Survey of Privacy Concerns in Wearable Devices
With the continued improvement and innovation, technology has become an integral part of our daily lives. The rapid adoption of technology and its affordability has given rise to the Internet-of-Things (IoT). IoT is an interconnected network of devices that are able to communicate and share information seamlessly. IoT encompasses a gamut of heterogeneous devices ranging from a small sensor to large industrial machines. One such domain of IoT that has seen a significant growth in the recent few years is that of the wearable devices. While the privacy issues for medical devices has been well-researched and documented in the literature, the threats to privacy arising from the use of consumer wearable devices have received very little attention from the research community. This paper presents a survey of the literature to understand the various privacy challenges, mitigation strategies, and future research directions as a result of the widespread adoption of wearable devices.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1821560 1723765
PAR ID:
10186799
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
4549 to 4553
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Abstract—Internet of Things (IoT) has become a pervasive and diverse concept in recent years. IoT applications and services have given rise to a number of sub-fields in the IoT space. Wearable technology, with its particular set of characteristics and application domains, has formed a rapidly growing subfield of IoT, viz., Wearable Internet of Things (WIoT). While numerous wearable devices are available in the market today, security and privacy are key factors for wide adoption of WIoT. Wearable devices are resource constrained by nature with limited storage, power, and computation. A Cloud-Enabled IoT (CEIoT) architecture, a dominant paradigm currently shaping the industry and suggested by many researchers, needs to be adopted for WIoT. In this paper, we develop an access control framework for cloud-enabled WIoT (CEWIoT) based on the Access Control Oriented (ACO) architecture recently developed for CEIoT in general. We first enhance the ACO architecture from the perspective of WIoT by adding an Object Abstraction Layer, and then develop our framework based on interactions between different layers of this enhanced ACO architecture. We present a general classification and taxonomy of IoT devices, along with brief introduction to various application domains of IoT and WIoT. We then present a remote health and fitness monitoring use case to illustrate different access control aspects of our framework and outline its possible enforcement in a commercial CEIoT platform, viz., AWS IoT. Finally, we discuss the objectives of our access control framework and relevant open problems. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    The privacy of users and information are becoming increasingly important with the growth and pervasive use of mobile devices such as wearables, mobile phones, drones, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Today many of these mobile devices are equipped with cameras which enable users to take pictures and record videos anytime they need to do so. In many such cases, bystanders’ privacy is not a concern, and as a result, audio and video of bystanders are often captured without their consent. We present results from a user study in which 21 participants were asked to use a wearable system called FacePET developed to enhance bystanders’ facial privacy by providing a way for bystanders to protect their own privacy rather than relying on external systems for protection. While past works in the literature focused on privacy perceptions of bystanders when photographed in public/shared spaces, there has not been research with a focus on user perceptions of bystander-based wearable devices to enhance privacy. Thus, in this work, we focus on user perceptions of the FacePET device and/or similar wearables to enhance bystanders’ facial privacy. In our study, we found that 16 participants would use FacePET or similar devices to enhance their facial privacy, and 17 participants agreed that if smart glasses had features to conceal users’ identities, it would allow them to become more popular. 
    more » « less
  3. The increasing adoption of smart home devices has raised significant concerns regarding privacy, security, and vulnerability to cyber threats. This study addresses these challenges by presenting a federated learning framework enhanced with blockchain technology to detect intrusions in smart home environments. The proposed approach combines knowledge distillation and transfer learning to support heterogeneous IoT devices with varying computational capacities, ensuring efficient local training without compromising privacy. Blockchain technology is integrated to provide decentralized, tamper-resistant access control through Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), allowing only authenticated devices to participate in the federated learning process. This combination ensures data confidentiality, system integrity, and trust among devices. This framework’s performance was evaluated using the N-BaIoT dataset, showcasing its ability to detect anomalies caused by botnets such as Mirai and BASHLITE across diverse IoT devices. Results demonstrate significant improvements in intrusion detection accuracy, particularly for resource-constrained devices, while maintaining privacy and adaptability in dynamic smart home environments. These findings highlight the potential of this blockchain-enhanced federated learning system to offer a scalable, robust, and privacy-preserving solution for securing smart homes against evolving threats. 
    more » « less
  4. Wearable devices are ubiquitous and Internet of Things (IoT) devices have made it possible by connecting real-time devices to virtual cloud. There are also a tremendous number of IoT-enabled consumer products for various healthcare applications. Mostly, IoT devices are used for health monitoring systems, though other business and service communities are customizing the IoT technology for greater opportunity and long-term benefit. Wearable health devices have been used for better health monitoring and exchanging more data with the physician to get the guidance of treatment or earlier diagnostic. Health monitoring in athletes is one of the multifaceted applications of wearable IoT devices whereas these devices collect and store data on their performance and progression. This technology can protect athletes by detecting any adverse health problem that occurs during the training period or at the time of the game. In this paper, we investigate the real-time monitoring of physiological parameters of the athlete during game time and performance analysis from the stored data. Continuous health monitoring during game time and off-days will reduce sports-related risks,stress and injuries of an athlete even sometimes it can save them from life-risk fatal accidents. This research integrates an IoT-based framework to develop a stress index for athletes that can be used as an indicator for monitoring athlete’s health. The proposed framework helps in monitoring the variability of the sensor information for the long-term analysis. 
    more » « less
  5. With the availability of Internet of Things (IoT) devices offering varied services, smart home environments have seen widespread adoption in the last two decades. Protecting privacy in these environments becomes an important problem because IoT devices may collect information about the home’s occupants without their knowledge or consent. Furthermore, a large number of devices in the home, each collecting small amounts of data, may, in aggregate, reveal non-obvious attributes about the home occupants. A first step towards addressing privacy is discovering what devices are present in the home. In this paper, we formally define device discovery in smart homes and identify the features that constitute discovery in that environment. Then, we propose an evaluative rubric that rates smart home technology initiatives on their device discovery capabilities and use it to evaluate four commonly deployed technologies. We find none cover all device discovery aspects. We conclude by proposing a combined technology solution that provides comprehensive device discovery tailored to smart homes. 
    more » « less