Privacy Preserving in Electronic Health Records: A Comparative Study

Electronic Health Records (EHR) have become a cornerstone of modern healthcare, enabling efficient storage, retrieval, and management of patient data. With the rise of IoT devices such as smartwatches, fitness trackers, and other wearable technology, accessing EHR in real-time has become increasingly common. These devices often operate in constrained environments with limited computational resources, necessitating cryptographic algorithms that are both lightweight and secure. This research evaluates some lightweight cryptographic algorithms—Speck, AES, Simon, LEA, DES, and RSA—across four operating systems with different resources. The study focuses on key performance metrics, including execution time, energy consumption, memory usage, and CPU usage, to determine the best algorithm for securing EHR on resource-constrained IoT devices. The findings highlight Speck and AES as the most efficient algorithms, providing quick, secure, and resource-friendly operations. In contrast, DES and RSA exhibited high resource demands, making them unsuitable for such applications. This study underscores the need for carefully selecting cryptographic algorithms to enhance security and efficiency in IoT-based healthcare systems.