The Role of Trust in Ubiquitous Healthcare

Abstract

As the cornerstone of effective patient-physician relationships in traditional healthcare infrastructure, trust faces new opportunities as well as challenges in ubiquitous healthcare system. Ubiquitous computing technologies enable participants in healthcare system share their experience more effectively, which leads to better trust decisions for trust decision mechanisms. At the same time, the environments for trust decision making in healthcare system becomes more dynamic because of the highly dynamic nature of ubiquitous computing. In this paper, we contribute to analyze the importance of trust in ubiquitous healthcare and give three typical scenarios of using trust in ubiquitous healthcare: emergency response, ubiquitous access to medical data and choose a reliable service provider. Trust is used as the basis for automatic decision making in these scenarios: whether to use a healthcare service, whether to permit the access to resources in dynamic collaborations between patients and healthcare service providers.