Securing the next generation of digital health
- ENTRUST
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 21 hours ago
How the ENTRUST Framework Can Protect MULTIPULM’s Integrated Care Solutions
The future of healthcare lies in connected, personalised, and remote care. The MULTIPULM project, a visionary Horizon Europe initiative, is pioneering this future by developing a digital platform to transform care for people with Chronic Respiratory Diseases (CRDs) and multimorbidity in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
As we celebrate the ambition of digital health projects like MULTIPULM, we must pair innovation with foundational security. This is what the ENTRUST Project solutions ensure: the security principles and framework developed by ENTRUST, particularly its use case focusing on the security of wearables, offer a robust and necessary blueprint for MULTIPULM’s integrated care ecosystem.
MULTIPULM: Digital Monitoring and the Security Imperative
The MULTIPULM project is addressing the urgent challenge of fragmented care and limited digital health access for CRD patients in countries like Brazil, Serbia, and Türkiye. To close this gap, the project is developing an integrated digital ecosystem that offers:
Continuous Home Monitoring: Tools for breathing assessment, sleep analysis, and lifestyle tracking.
Early Risk Detection: Using AI-driven analytics to flag potential adverse drug effects and predict hospital readmission risks.
for people with multiple chronic conditions in low & middle income countries (LMICs)
These solutions rely heavily on Connected Medical Devices (CMDs), often in the form of home-based sensors and wearables, to collect real-time data from patients. This data (on respiratory function, sleep patterns, and multimorbidity management) is widely admitted to be the most sensitive data possible. Any compromise to its integrity or privacy could lead to catastrophic clinical consequences, such as an inaccurate diagnosis or inappropriate change in treatment protocol.
MULTIPULM aspires to be a high-impact digital health project, to be validated with thousands of patients. Its aim for long-term sustainability and trust cannot be achieved without world-class cybersecurity embedded into its foundation.
ENTRUST: A Zero Trust Blueprint for Wearable Devices
The ENTRUST Project was specifically designed to tackle the lack of strong, standardised cybersecurity for connected medical devices. Its solution is a Trust Management Framework built on Zero Trust principles that governs the entire lifecycle of a CMD.
One of ENTRUST’s key evaluation scenarios is the "Wearables for health monitoring" use case. This scenario addresses the exact challenges faced by MULTIPULM: securing highly sensitive data collected by resource-constrained, remote devices. In this use case, ENTRUST directly addresses threats such as a compromised Bluetooth channel or device, which could allow a malicious actor to inject false data or disrupt monitoring.
The ENTRUST Framework provides solutions directly applicable to MULTIPULM:
Dynamic Trust Assessment: ENTRUST introduces models to continuously identify the Required Trust Level (RTL) for a device (e.g., a respiratory monitoring sensor) and measures its Actual Trust Level (ATL) in real-time. If a sensor (like the ones used in MULTIPULM) shows irregular behaviour, the system can instantly assess the risk and take mitigation steps.
Real-Time Conformity Certificate: The project leverages a breakthrough concept: A real-time certificate, often based on distributed ledgers, that verifies a device’s safety and compliance at any moment. For the MULTIPULM platform, this would ensure that the data being ingested for AI analysis and clinical decision support comes from a verifiably safe and uncompromised source.
Lifecycle Management: ENTRUST ensures security from the initial design phase through deployment, secure updates, and eventual decommissioning, eliminating vulnerabilities that often arise during a device’s operational lifetime.
The Synergy: Robust Security for Respiratory Health
The alignment between ENTRUST and MULTIPULM is clear: the ENTRUST security use case on wearables is a perfect conceptual and technological match for MULTIPULM’s digital tools.
MULTIPULM is creating innovative, patient-centric solutions; ENTRUST provides the trust layer necessary to make these solutions viable and sustainable in real-world settings.
By applying the ENTRUST Trust Management Framework to the MULTIPULM ecosystem, the project can ensure:
Data Integrity and Accuracy: Clinicians and AI models can trust that the home monitoring data, vital for managing conditions like COPD and multimorbidity, has not been tampered with during collection or transit.
Patient Confidence: Patients in Brazil, Serbia, and Türkiye who rely on these digital tools can be assured that their deeply personal health data is protected by the highest standards of European cybersecurity research.
Regulatory Compliance: The real-time conformity assessment supports the highest levels of safety and regulatory assurance, paving the way for easier integration into national health systems.
Ultimately, integrating the ENTRUST framework with MULTIPULM’s digital platform represents a model for future Horizon Europe digital health initiatives: proving that innovative healthcare delivery and uncompromised cybersecurity are two sides of the same coin. This powerful synergy can build the robust, equitable, and trustworthy digital health services that patients worldwide deserve.
For more information on ENTRUST:
Web: www.entrust-he.eu
Contact: thanos@futureneeds.eu
For more information on MULTIPULM:
The article is co-authored by Georgia Nikolakopoulou (Communication and Dissemination Manager at Future Needs, leading Dissemination, Communication and networking activities of the MULTIPULM project), and Thanos Arvanitidis (Innovation Project Manager and Researcher at Future Needs, leading
Impact creation activities of the ENTRUST project).
