Collecting Health Lifelog Data From Smartwatch Users in a Privacy-Preserving Manner

Abstract

With the development of easily wearable devices for humans, monitoring, and collecting lifelog data related to personal health status is easier than ever before. The advances in such wearable devices allow healthcare service providers to easily collect a vast amount of health lifelogs from diverse users for the purpose of data analysis. However, collecting health information of individual users indiscriminately may lead to serious privacy issues, because health lifelog data usually contain sensitive information. Thus, in this paper, we develop methods capable of collecting sensitive health lifelogs from a smartwatch, which is the most popular wearable device, while protecting the data privacy of smartwatch users. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can achieve an effective tradeoff between the degree of privacy protection and the accuracy in aggregate statistics. A correlation coefficient with an absolute value ranging from 0.808 to 0.945 between the degree of privacy protection and the accuracy in aggregate statistics can be accomplished using the proposed methods.