Secure Fingerprint Identification for Unconscious Personal Health Record Users During an Emergency Situation

The Personal Health Record (PHR) system is a system that allows an individual to collect, store and share his/her health-related information. Such information about the victim during an emergency is critical, especially when the victim is unconscious. A privacy-preserved user identification method for a PHR system during an emergency was proposed in this study. Two cancelable biometrics were used with two fingerprints of the victim to identify the victim and return the victim’s PHR information. The proposed method was evaluated against the previously proposed method using a synthesis fingerprint workload that was created to mimic the environment of an emergency. The two main measurements were the processing time and the identification accuracy. The proposed method was also evaluated against three attack scenarios including (1) Stealing the original fingerprints during the PHR user identification process, (2) Collecting the identity-related information during the identification process to perform illegal access to the PHRs and (3) The PHR identity exposure. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach had a higher potential to be used for identifying the PHR user during an emergency than the previous approach