Preserving patients’ privacy in health scenarios through a multicontext-aware system

Abstract

The Big Data age is characterized by the explosive increase of data managed by electronic systems. Healthcare Information Management systems are aware of this situation having to adapt services and procedures. This, along with the fact that the proliferation of mobile devices and communications has also promoted the use of context-aware services ubiquitously accessible, means that protecting the privacy of the patients’ information is an even greater challenge. To address this issue, a mechanism that allows patients to manage and control their private information is required. We propose the preservation of patients’ privacy in a health scenario through a multicontext-aware system called h-MAS (health-related multicontext-aware system). h-MAS is a privacy-preserving and context-aware solution for health scenarios with the aim of managing the privacy of the users’ information in both intra- and inter-context scenarios. In a health scenario, h-MAS suggests a pool of privacy policies to users, who are aware of the health context in which they are located. Users can update the policies according to their interests. These policies protect the privacy of the users’ health records, locations, as well as context-aware information being accessed by third parties without their consent. The information on patients and the health context is managed through semantic web techniques, which provide a common infrastructure that makes it possible to represent, process, and share information between independent systems more easily.