The expansion of telehealth services is enabling healthcare professionals to consult, diagnose, advise or perform tasks remotely, enabling them to treat more patients in their own homes or consult on cases on the other side of the world. The security of sensitive user information is critical to effective and efficient delivery of healthcare services. Artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology are identified as key drivers of emerging telehealth systems, enabling efficient delivery of telehealth services to billions of patients globally. Specifically, AI facilitates the processing and analysis of complex telehealth data, and blockchain technology offers decentralised, transparent, traceable, reliable, trustful, and provable security to telehealth systems.

Emerging healthcare networks are interconnected physical systems that use cyber technologies for interaction and functionality. The proliferation of massive internet-of-things (IoT) devices enables remote and distributed access to cutting-edge diagnostics and treatment options in modern healthcare systems. New security vulnerabilities are emerging due to the increasing complexity of the healthcare architecture, in particular, threats to medical devices and critical infrastructure pose significant concerns owing to their potential risks to patient health and safety. In recent times, patients have been exposed to high risks from attacks capable of disrupting critical medical infrastructure, communications facilities, and services, interfering with medical devices, or compromising sensitive user data.

Fifth generation (5G) wireless networks are now commercialized, and the research focus has shifted towards sixth generation (6G) wireless systems. The integration of sensor nodes and massive machine type communication (MTC) devices (MDs) in ubiquitous 5G networks has facilitated the design of critical enabling technologies to support billions of data-hungry applications. By leveraging sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sensitive user information can be harvested and transmitted to receivers via WSN-assisted channels, which are often not well secured. Consequently, sensitive user information can be intercepted and used unlawfully. The security and confidentiality measures used for data transmission over existing 5G WSN-assisted channels are limited. 6G systems are envisaged to face fiercer security challenges. In 6G wireless networks, a new set of sensing and precise localization techniques are predicted. Thus, the need to secure user information against adversarial attacks needs to be implemented at the design stage.