Beyond Smart Homes: An In-Depth Analysis of Smart Aging Care System Security

The upward trend in the percentage of the population older than 65 has made smart aging more relevant than ever before. Growing old in a traditional assisted living facility can take a toll on the mental well-being of the elderly individual, on top of other factors like extravagant costs, potential negligence from caregivers, and a ceaseless demand for healthcare personnel. Aging in one’s own space instead of a senior residence is the desirable alternative thanks to enabling technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT facilitates connected healthcare, safety, entertainment, and social well-being of the older population. However, it suffers from a multitude of security vulnerabilities. Although researchers have investigated the security challenges of several IoT ecosystems, IoT systems in the context of smart aging care have not been well studied from a security perspective. In this article, we present an in-depth analysis of smart aging care system security issues. A smart aging care system is essentially a superset of smart homes and healthcare monitoring systems. The sheer variety of technologies at play and the amount of data generated, combined with physical vulnerabilities and a lack of technological exposure of the intended occupant group put smart aging care systems at great risk. Attacks against relatively benign smart home devices can bring serious consequences because of the context in which these devices are employed. Thus, the purpose of our study is four-fold: (i) defining the components and functionalities of a smart aging care system, (ii) identifying security vulnerabilities and outlining suitable countermeasures for them, (iii) analyzing how the attacks uniquely impact senior users’ Quality of Life (QoL), (iv) highlighting avenues for future research and how the threat landscape in smart aging care systems differ from general smart homes.