Towards Decentralized Accountability and Self-sovereignty in Healthcare Systems

Abstract

With the increasing development and adoption of wearable devices, people care more about their health conditions than ever before. Both patients and doctors as well as insurance agencies benefit from this advanced technology. However, the emerging wearable devices creates a major concern over health data privacy as data collected from those devices can reflect patients’ heath conditions and habits, and could increase the data disclosure risks among the healthcare providers and application vendors. In this paper, we propose using the trusted execution platform enabled by Intel SGX to provide accountability for data access and propose a decentralized approach with blockchain technology to address the privacy concern. By developing a web application for personal health data management (PHDM) systems, the individuals are capable of synchronizing sensor data from wearable devices with online account and controlling data access from any third parties. The protected personal health data and data access records are hashed and anchored to a permanent but secure ledger with platform dependency, ensuring data integrity and accountability. Analysis shows that our approach provides user privacy and accountability with acceptable overhead.