Securely Connecting Wearable Health Devices to External Displays

Wearable health technology is becoming a hot commodity as it has the potential to help both patients and clinicians continuously monitor vital signs and symptoms. One popular type of wearable devices are worn on human wrist and are equipped with sensors to passively perform sensing tasks. Their constrained user interface, however, is ineffective to display the sensory data for users. We envision connecting a wrist-worn device to a display device, such as a television, so the user is able to view the sensory data. Such connections must be secure to prevent the sensory data from being eavesdropped by other devices, must be made only when the user intends, and must be easy even when a new display is encountered (such as in a medical clinic, or a hotel room). In this presentation, we will discuss the secure wearable/display connection problem by revisiting existing methods and hardware designs of wrist-worn devices and display devices. We then present possible solutions that leverage the built-in hardware components of wrist-worn devices to implement, secure, intentional, easy connections to ambient display devices.