Healthcare Social Networks Research Articles

Toward Privacy-Preserving Symptoms Matching in SDN-Based Mobile Healthcare Social Networks

Mobile healthcare social networks (MHSNs) have arisen as a very promising brandnew healthcare system, which will greatly improve the quality of life. Moreover, with the help of software defined networking (SDN) paradigm, it can enhance the user experience. To achieve personal health information sharing and the access control among parities, a similar symptoms matching process should be executed before that. However, the matching process requires users to exchange symptoms information, conflicting with the ever-increasing privacy concerns on protecting private symptoms from strangers. To realize privacy-preserving symptoms matching, in this paper, we design two blind signature-based symptom matching schemes in SDN-based MHSNs, which can achieve the coarse-grained symptom matching and fine-grained symptom matching, respectively. Moreover, our schemes do not relay on any trusted third party. Security analysis and detailed simulations show that our proposed schemes can realize efficient privacy-preserving symptom matching. Finally, we do comprehensive experimental evaluation on real-world smartphones to demonstrate the practicality of our proposed schemes.

Perceptions of Singaporean patients living with implantable cardioverter defibrillators: an exploratory qualitative study

BackgroundDespite the increasing use of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) as a preventive approach for high-risk patients with arrhythmias, little is known about the perceptions of ICD recipients regarding these devices and their impact on quality of life. ObjectivesTo explore perceptions towards quality of life, coping strategies, and learning needs of patients living with ICDs in Singapore. Methods16 participants (age ranges 52 to 84 years old) were purposively recruited and interviewed individually for this exploratory qualitative study. Data collected was analyzed using thematic analysis. ResultsSeven themes emerged: experiencing ICD shocks, ambivalent “love-hate” relationship with ICD, receiving support from healthcare professionals and social networks, attaining acceptance and returning to normalcy, physical coping, emotional coping, and readiness and need for enhanced patient education. ConclusionsWith an insight to the perceptions of ICD recipients in Singapore, future practice can focus on addressing their concerns and improve post-implantation quality of life.

Medical Image Retrieval in Healthcare Social Networks

In this article, the authors present a multimodal research model to research medical images based on multimedia information that is extracted from a radiological collaborative social network. The opinions shared on a medical image in a medico-social network is a textual description which in most cases requires cleaning by using a medical thesaurus. In addition, they describe the textual description and medical image in a TF-IDF weight vector using a “bag-of-words” approach. The authors then use latent semantic analysis to establish relationships between textual terms and visual terms in shared opinions on the medical image. The model is evaluated against the ImageCLEFmedbaseline, which is the ground truth for the experiments. The authors have conducted numerous experiments with different descriptors and many combinations of modalities. The analysis of results shows that when the model is based on two methods it can increase the performance of a research system based on a single modality both visually or textually.

A traceable threshold attribute-based signcryption for mHealthcare social network

With the rapid development of wireless sensor technologies, mobile healthcare social network (MHSN) built upon wireless body sensor network (WBSN), has evolved into an innovative next-generation healthcare system in our aging society. Nevertheless, it is vital to focus on the security issues and the tradeoff between privacy preserving and traceability. A novel security mechanism named as the traceable threshold attribute-based signcryption (TTABSC) can permits patients to be friends and make a proper tradeoff between privacy and traceability. The proposed scheme leverages a four-party model to prevent the leak of a patient's sensitive information, including symptom information, identity and patient's health information (PHI). Combining the digital signatures and encryption, we provide a series of performance analysis, including correctness, unforgeability, traceability and privacy. Compared with previous works, our most efficient scheme generates a constant signcryption size.

A traceable threshold attribute-based signcryption for mHealthcare social network

With the rapid development of wireless sensor technologies, mobile healthcare social network (MHSN) built upon wireless body sensor network (WBSN), has evolved into an innovative next-generation healthcare system in our aging society. Nevertheless, it is vital to focus on the security issues and the tradeoff between privacy preserving and traceability. A novel security mechanism named as the traceable threshold attribute-based signcryption (TTABSC) can permits patients to be friends and make a proper tradeoff between privacy and traceability. The proposed scheme leverages a four-party model to prevent the leak of a patient's sensitive information, including symptom information, identity and patient's health information (PHI). Combining the digital signatures and encryption, we provide a series of performance analysis, including correctness, unforgeability, traceability and privacy. Compared with previous works, our most efficient scheme generates a constant signcryption size.

Secure Identity-Based Data Sharing and Profile Matching for Mobile Healthcare Social Networks in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing and social networks are changing the way of healthcare by providing real-time data sharing in a cost-effective manner. However, data security issue is one of the main obstacles to the wide application of mobile healthcare social networks (MHSNs), since health information is considered to be highly sensitive. In this paper, we introduce a secure data sharing and profile matching scheme for the MHSN in cloud computing. The patients can outsource their encrypted health records to cloud storage with an identity-based broadcast encryption technique, and share them with a group of doctors in a secure and efficient manner. We then present an attribute-based conditional data re-encryption construction which permits the doctors who satisfy the pre-defined conditions in the ciphertext to authorize the cloud platform to convert a ciphertext into a new ciphertext of an identity-based encryption scheme for specialist without leaking any sensitive information. Furthermore, we provide a profile matching mechanism in the MHSN based on identity-based encryption with an equality test, which helps patients to find friends in a privacy-preserving way and achieves flexible authorization on the encrypted health records with resisting the keywords guessing attack. Moreover, this mechanism reduces the computation cost on the patient side. The security analysis and experimental evaluation show that our scheme is practical for protecting the data security and privacy in the MHSN.

Privacy Protective Research: Facilitating Ethically Responsible Access to Administrative Data

Companies and government entities collect substantial amounts of administrative data through the Internet; mobile communications; and a vast infrastructure of devices and sensors embedded in healthcare facilities, retail outlets, public transportation, social networks, workplaces, and homes. They use administrative data to test new products and services, improve existing offerings, conduct research, and foster innovation. However, the lack of a clear legal framework and ethical guidelines for use of administrative data jeopardizes the value of important research. Concerns over legal impediments and ethical restrictions threaten to diminish productive collaboration between researchers and private sector businesses. This article provides strategies for organizations to minimize risks of reidentification and privacy violations for individual data subjects. In addition, it suggests that privacy and ethical concerns would best be managed by supporting the development of administrative data centers to lower transaction costs and increase the reproducibility of research conducted on administrative data.

Stigma Communication Surrounding PrEP: The Experiences of A Sample of Men Who Have Sex With Men

ABSTRACT HIV is a serious problem in the USA, particularly for men who have sex with men (MSM). A new means of HIV prevention, called pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), has been shown to be highly effective. However, in spite of earning FDA approval, adoption of PrEP by MSM has been limited. The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of a sample of 38 MSM who have adopted PrEP, focusing on communication with healthcare providers and social networks. In-depth interviews were used to collect data. Findings revealed that stigmatization by healthcare providers as well as stigmatization by other MSM was a relatively common experience for participants. Additionally, participants described that a high level of health literacy, health advocacy, and communication skill were necessary to adopt PrEP. Given these findings, strategies are suggested for improving MSM’s healthcare and increasing rates of PrEP adoption.

A cross-domain framework for designing healthcare mobile applications mining social networks to generate recommendations of training and nutrition planning

Nowadays, people are practicing physical exercise in order to maintain good health conditions. Such physical workouts are required by a plan, which should be designed and supervised by sport specialists and medical assistants. Thus, the exercise sessions shall start with consultation of a coach, doctor and dietician; however, many times this scenario is not presented. In typical activities such as running, cycling and fitness, people use health mobile apps with their smartphones, which offer support for these activities. Nevertheless, the functionality and operation of these applications are isolated, because many and long questionnaires are performed. Additionally, the physical and health state of a user is not considered. These issues would be taken into account for determining recommendations about the time for doing exercise and the kind of activity for each person. In this work, a social semantic mobile framework to generate recommendations where a mobile application allows sensing the physical performance, taking into consideration medical criteria with smartphones is proposed. The approach includes a semantic cross-information that comes from social network and official data as well as sport activities and medical knowledge. This knowledge is translated into application ontologies related directly to health, nutrition and training domains. The methodology also covers physical fitness tests and a monitoring tool for evaluating the nutrition plan and the correct execution of the training. As case study, the mobile application offers to evaluate the physical and health conditions of a runner, automatically generate a nutrition plan and training, monitor plans and recomputed them if users make changes in their routines. The data provided from the social network are used as feedback in the application, in order to make the training and nutrition plans more flexible by applying spatio-temporal analysis based on machine learning. Finally, the generated training and nutrition plans were validated by specialists, they have demonstrated 82% of effectiveness rate in exercise training routines and 86% in nutrition plans. In addition, the results were compared with isolated approaches and manual recommendations made by specialists, the obtained overall performance was 81%.

Abstract A42: Breast and cervical cancer screening adherence among Latina women living in South Texas: Results from the Esperanza y Vida (Hope and Life) intervention

Abstract PURPOSE The evidence-based Esperanza y Vida [EyV] (Hope and Life) program was developed to increase awareness of screening methods among Latinas living in South Texas and explore social and contextual influences that may contribute to disproportionate breast cancer (BC) and high cervical cancer (CC) incidence. This study aimed to identify sociodemographic characteristics of participants, including religion and church attendance, within the larger EyV study, who reported barriers to BC and CC screening. METHODS Lay health advisors were trained to deliver the program to promote BC and CC awareness and screening. Participants (N=227) completed questionnaires that assessed knowledge, screening adherence: breast self-exam [BSE], clinical breast exam [CBE], mammography, Papanicolaou (pap) test, and health beliefs about BC and CC and were contacted for follow-up to assess screening and offer assistance in obtaining exams. RESULTS There was no association among Latinas who participated in BSE (N=118, chi-squared=8.978, p=.344), CBE (N=119, chi-squared=1.875, p=.392), and mammogram (N=98, chi-squared=8.978, p=.344) in the past 12-months and church attendance. Latinas that received a pelvic exam (N=109) and pap test (N=139) did so as part of their yearly exam. The most prevalent barriers (N=62) to screening adherence were cost (N=45) and lack of adequate health insurance (N=44). Eligible Latinas (N=174) that reported barriers to breast exams in the past 12-months believed 1) healthcare professionals felt neutral (p=.099) and 2) their friends not interested (p=.055) in screening Hispanic/Latinas for BC and CC, 3) weekly church attendance (p=.071) and 4) no education (p=.097). Eligible Latinas (N=175) that reported barriers to pap testing in the past 12-months believed 1) healthcare professionals felt not interested (p=.248) and 2) their friends either not interested (p=.092) or neutral (p=.126) in screening Hispanic/Latinas for BC and CC, 3) weekly church attendance (p=.161) and 4) age (p=.014) were factors. CONCLUSIONS These findings have implications for further culturally-tailored BC and CC education, screening interventions and patient navigation. Additional exploration of the influence of healthcare professionals and social networks in screening behaviors among this population is warranted. Citation Format: Jameisha B. Brown, Thelma C. Hurd, Thankham S. Sunil. Breast and cervical cancer screening adherence among Latina women living in South Texas: Results from the Esperanza y Vida (Hope and Life) intervention. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Ninth AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2016 Sep 25-28; Fort Lauderdale, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2017;26(2 Suppl):Abstract nr A42.

Information passing in healthcare social networks

In recent years, social networks have become one of the most influential developments in our lives. In this paper, we investigate trust relationships and information passing in online social networks that focus on health. Our results are based on a social network called doktorsitesi.com which is the one of the largest online social networks in Turkey about healthcare that is managed by professionals. We show that there is a connection among patients in terms of information passing in doktorlarsitesi.com and quantify this information passing. Our findings implicate that healthcare interactions are embedded in social networks, and the results on the existence of information passing on other types of e-commerce social networks also apply to healthcare social networks.

Privacy Enhanced Cloud-Based Recommendation Service for Implicit Discovery of Relevant Support Groups in Healthcare Social Networks

Recommending support-groups in healthcare social networks is the problem of detecting for each patient his/her membership to one support-group of relevant patients. The patients in each support-group share some relevant preferences which guarantee that the support-group as a whole satisfies some desired properties of similarity. As a result, forming these support-groups requires the availability of personal data of different patients. This is a crucial requirement for different recommender services. With the increasing trend of service providers to collect a large volume of personal data regarding their end-users, presumably to better serve them. However, a significant part of the data that is typically collected is not essential to the service being offered, or to the completion of the services it was presumably released for. Gathering such unnecessary data can be seen as a privacy threat, and storing it exposes the end-users to further unavoidable risks. In this paper, a privacy enhanced cloud-based recommendation service is proposed for the implicit discovery of appropriate support groups in healthcare social network. A fog based middleware (FMCP) was introduced that runs at patients' sides and allows exchanging of their information to facilities recommending and creating support-groups without disclosing their real preferences to other parties. The membership of patients in various support groups allows receiving highly appropriate and reliable healthcare-related advices. The system utilizes two protocols to attain this goal. Experiments were performed on real dataset.

Flexible and Lightweight Access Control for Online Healthcare Social Networks in the Context of the Internet of Things

Online healthcare social networks (OHSNs) play an essential role in sharing information among medical experts and patients who are equipped with similar experiences. To access other patients’ data or experts’ diagnosis anywhere and anytime, it is necessary to integrate the OHSN into the Internet as part of the Internet of Things (IoT). Therefore, it is crucial to design an efficient and versatile access control scheme that can grant and revoke a user to access the OHSN. In this paper, we propose novel attribute-based encryption (ABE) features with user revocation and verifiable decryption outsourcing to control the access privilege of the users. The security of the proposed ABE scheme is given in the well-studied random oracle model. With the proposed ABE scheme, the malicious users can be excluded from the system and the user can offload most of the overhead in the decryption to an untrusted cloud server in a verifiable manner. An access control scheme for the OHSN has been given in the context of the IoT based on the proposed ABE scheme. The simulation demonstrates that our access control mechanism is practical.

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing and Collaboration in Mobile Healthcare Social Networks of Smart Cities

Mobile healthcare social networks (MHSN) integrated with connected medical sensors and cloud-based health data storage provide preventive and curative health services in smart cities. The fusion of social data together with real-time health data facilitates a novel paradigm of healthcare big data analysis. However, the collaboration of healthcare and social network service providers may pose a series of security and privacy issues. In this paper, we propose a secure health and social data sharing and collaboration scheme in MHSN. To preserve the data privacy, we realize secure and fine-grained health data and social data sharing with attribute-based encryption and identity-based broadcast encryption techniques, respectively, which allows patients to share their private personal data securely. In order to achieve enhanced data collaboration, we allow the healthcare analyzers to access both the reencrypted health data and the social data with authorization from the data owner based on proxy reencryption. Specifically, most of the health data encryption and decryption computations are outsourced from resource-constrained mobile devices to a health cloud, and the decryption of the healthcare analyzer incurs a low cost. The security and performance analysis results show the security and efficiency of our scheme.

Attribute-based handshake protocol for mobile healthcare social networks

In this paper, we study the privacy protection problem of handshake protocol for mobile healthcare social network, and introduce the concept of attribute-based handshake (ABH) protocol. Using ABH, users in mobile healthcare social network can make a handshake to authenticate each other and obtain a common session key without exposing their privacy when their attributes meet the social needs of each other. Then, we provide the formal definition and security model of ABH protocol with a specific construction proving its security in the standard model. Finally, we introduce how to deploy our ABH protocol in the mobile healthcare social network.

Information quality in healthcare social media – an architectural approach

The evolution of the Internet has provided new and more efficient communication and collaboration channels between individuals, empowering them to share health information and to interact more and more using social media channels. Information quality is frequently identified as one of the main limitations of social media in healthcare. The objective of the paper is to discuss the social implications and limitations on information quality in healthcare social media, and particularly to contribute to the analysis and development of healthcare social networks (SN) and online healthcare social network services (SNS). For that reason, a formal architectural analysis of healthcare SN and SNS has been proposed, considering the complexity of both systems, but stressing on quality of Information aspects. Any social system - and its network of interrelations - can be analyzed as a real world system. Therefore, it is possible to model the structural components, interrelations and functionality (system architecture) of healthcare SN and SNS. The Generic Component Model (GCM) has demonstrated to be an ideal architectural framework for any real system’s analysis. Based on the GCM, the architecture of quality aware healthcare SNS is proposed. Information quality is addressed in the domain dimension of the GCM, supported by the definition of information quality policies. The practical implementation of quality-driven online SNS and information quality policies was demonstrated by the development of an online SNS supporting health promotion programs in a healthcare institution. In order to evaluate the relevance of the information quality policies proposed, a descriptive study was performed, in which the content published in the online SNS was selected strictly following the information quality policy. The study demonstrated that users’ perceived information quality was high. The paper addresses sociotechnical aspects of social media by providing a formal method for the management of information quality in online healthcare social networks.

Clinical Profile and Outcome of Electric Injury in North Indian Populations

Introduction- Electric burn injuries represent a dangerous nature of injury in which disability is high and functional and aesthetic sequel are significant .A pathophysiology depending on voltage, current flow and resistance of skin. Aims And Objectives -1-Demographic study of electric burn 2-To study clinical profile of electric burn patients, various preventive measure to avoid electric burns , Role of fasciotomy and its timing benefits 3-To look management strategy and to determine prognosis of electric burn patients in presence of complication, how its turn in effects morbidity and mortality . Materials And Methods-The study period was January 2010 to December 2012.Only electric burn patient were included. Patient data were included in detail with references to their age,sex,mode of injury ,surface area, part of body affected ,hospital stay, occupation ,outcome. Results And Conclusion-The study of 180 patients show that electric burn injuries cause significant morbidity and mortality .Majority of patients were male from most active group of society 15-40 yrs age .Upper limb was most affected part of body and amputation were most common surgery perform .Early and adequately done fasciotomy has a significant role in electric burn injuries to lower the incidence of amputation in extremities. Proper education, communications and rehabilitation may reduce the social burden due to occupational hazards.To prevent this life-threatening event, measures should be taken by health-care officials and social networks to help educate the people about application of safety equipment ,proper communication in between electrical department workers and improvement medical facility regarding burn cases or early refer of complicated burn to higher centre, through every available means of communication. Kewords- Electric injuries, upper limb ,amputation, occupation hazards ,Prevention

Secured ECG signal transmission for human emotional stress classification in wireless body area networks

Information security is key important when we are trying to interconnect the wireless body sensor network with the healthcare social network via mobile facilities. In this paper, we specially work on a secured electrocardiogram (ECG) signal transmission scheme to prevent further injuries for patients with heart diseases from human emotional stress. We proposed a dynamic encryption method via biometric information among frequency spectrums of ECG signals, which can guarantee both high classification rate (>90 %) and system energy efficiency. At the same time, cooperative relays are applied for an additional spatial diversity gains. Simulation results show that the improved transmission rate and signal power capacity can lower the probability of data intercept (LPI) and detection (LPD) by taking the advantages of both temporal and spatial diversities. The network security thereby can be further improved.

Unveiling consumers' privacy paradox behaviour in an economic exchange

Privacy paradox is of great interest to IS researchers and firms gathering personal information. It has been studied from social, behavioural, and economic perspectives independently. However, prior research has not examined the degrees of influence these perspectives contribute to the privacy paradox problem. We combine both economic and behavioural perspectives in our study of the privacy paradox with a price valuation of personal information through an economic experiment combined with a behavioural study on privacy paradox. Our goal is to reveal more insights on the privacy paradox through economic valuation on personal information. Results indicate that general privacy concerns or individual disclosure concerns do not have a significant influence on the price valuation of personal information. Instead, prior disclosure behaviour in specific scenario, like with healthcare providers or social networks, is a better indicator of consumer price valuations.

Unveiling consumer's privacy paradox behaviour in an economic exchange.

Privacy paradox is of great interest to IS researchers and firms gathering personal information. It has been studied from social, behavioural, and economic perspectives independently. However, prior research has not examined the degrees of influence these perspectives contribute to the privacy paradox problem. We combine both economic and behavioural perspectives in our study of the privacy paradox with a price valuation of personal information through an economic experiment combined with a behavioural study on privacy paradox. Our goal is to reveal more insights on the privacy paradox through economic valuation on personal information. Results indicate that general privacy concerns or individual disclosure concerns do not have a significant influence on the price valuation of personal information. Instead, prior disclosure behaviour in specific scenario, like with healthcare providers or social networks, is a better indicator of consumer price valuations.