How a Service User Knows the Level of Privacy and to Whom Trust in pHealth Systems?

Abstract

pHealth is a data (personal health information) driven approach that use communication networks and platforms as technical base. Often it' services take place in distributed multi-stakeholder environment. Typical pHealth services for the user are personalized information and recommendations how to manage specific health problems and how to behave healthy (prevention). The rapid development of micro- and nano-sensor technology and signal processing makes it possible for pHealth service provider to collect wide spectrum of personal health related information from vital signs to emotions and health behaviors. This development raises big privacy and trust challenges especially because in pHealth similarly to eCommerce and Internet shopping it is commonly expected that the user automatically trust in service provider and used information systems. Unfortunately, this is a wrong assumption because in pHealth's digital environment it almost impossible for the service user to know to whom to trust, and what the actual level of information privacy is. Therefore, the service user needs tools to evaluate privacy and trust of the service provider and information system used. In this paper, the authors propose a solution for privacy and trust as results of their antecedents, and for the use of computational privacy and trust. To answer the question, which antecedents to use, two literature reviews are performed and 27 privacy and 58 trust attributes suitable for pHealth are found. A proposal how to select a subset of antecedents for real life use is also provided.