Work Packages
- Requirements, validation and socio-legal context (WP1)
- professional home healthcare services
- consumer health and wellness services
- health communities
- Demonstration and standardization (WP2)
- Trust management for home healthcare services (WP3)
- Privacy preserving data mining in electronic health records (WP4)
- Private health services in a group with a distrusted server (WP5)
- Matching and social relationship management for decentralised healthcare services (WP6)
Objectives: In integrated healthcare systems, a large variety of providers and other stakeholders are involved. This work package identifies requirements for trusted healthcare, focusing on the 3 use cases:
On the basis of literature search and interviews with experts and users, the work package establishes the trust requirements. The work package will study the trustworthiness of services and the relationship between transparency, privacy and security.
Further, the work package studies the legal requirements regarding division of responsibilities and applicable legal data protection regime (e.g. data protection law, health law, regulations regarding the identification of citizens, both general and healthcare specific, and databases law).
A user driven approach will be taken; in which the users (different stakeholders) will be involved from the beginning. The methodology of involving users through a service design approach is applied through for example co-creation workshops with the different stakeholders. In this way the developed technology will meet the needs and demands of the users. A service blueprint will be developed describing the ecosystem of the product/service to be developed.
WP Leader: Paulien Melis - Waag Society
Objectives: This work package develops a demonstrator of a home healthcare system for COPD management (integrating the security technologies developed in the other work packages) that shows in particular interaction of the user with the security functionality. COPD patients can often benefit much from a change in lifestyle under medical supervision.
The demonstrator is used to evaluate the security functionality by systematic collection and analysis of feedback collected in user groups. The demonstrator will in particular show trust management and privacy preserving policies in selected scenarios for remote COPD management.
This work package will create two demonstrators (one in each requirement-design- validation cycle). The first demonstrator (a mock up of the final functionality) will be evaluated in WP1 and will serve to refine the requirements, improve the quality and guide the development in the second requirements-design-validation cycle. Finally, the work package will contribute to standardization in the area of security for healthcare by nationally and internationally contributing to the relevant standardization groups (e.g., Continua, HL7, NEN).
Standardization offers interoperability across the devices and services of different vendors. Thus it creates a market for remote healthcare products and prevents vendor lock-in. Standardization of security functions is particularly important because it supports users in establishing the trustworthiness of compliant services.
WP Leader: Hermie Hermens - RRD
Objectives: This work package will develop the technology for physicians and other users of measured home healthcare information to easily determine the trustworthiness of the information.
In particular, the goals of this work package are to investigate the issue of data trustworthiness from the home healthcare provider and patient perspectives, as well as to design methods and tools to increase and visualize indicators for data reliability and patient compliance (ensure that the data is coming from the right patient, and certified device, as well as that the measurement process was performed properly).
The security protocols, the cryptographic primitives, as well as the developed trust management system will be analyzed and validated both theoretically and practically with real end users in a case study in cooperation with other WPs.
WP Leader: Nicola Zannone - TU/e
Objectives: Electronic health records (EHRs) are very valuable for medical research and clinical trials. Researchers need EHRs to perform clinical trials on new medicines, for example. However, EHRs contain very sensitive data and should not reveal the identity of the patient. Therefore EHRs must be anonymized before they are released to the clinical investigators. The existing anonymization techniques are not sufficient for protecting the privacy of the patients’ data. The problem with techniques like k-anonymity and l-diversity is that they have been shown to be insecure; the anonymized data can easily be de-anonymized. Moreover, there is some health data which cannot be anonymized at all, such as DNA and dental data.
The goal of this work package is to propose new techniques which will enable us to build fundamentally novel solutions. In particular, we will propose techniques for search in encrypted data that would allow the investigators to access EHRs for medical research or clinical trials, while preserving the patients’ privacy. Our ambition is to go even further building algorithms for privacy preserving data mining, which will allow extraction of knowledge.
The system consists of patients who get treatment from a healthcare provider, the healthcare provider who treats the patients and collects medical data, the server which stores the EHRs and the investigators who use EHRs for clinical trials or medical research. One optional entity is a sponsor (e.g. pharmaceutical company) who finances the medical research or clinical trial. To assure the privacy of the patients’ data, EHRs are encrypted and then stored on the server. The system must provide mechanisms which allow the investigators to search in the database with EHRs in order to extract patterns from data sets and deduce knowledge from those patterns.
WP Leader: Pieter Hartel - TU Twente
Objectives: The business driver for Irdeto in this work package is: With digital set-top boxes, and even TV sets, becoming more powerful and more interactive (now often with two-way communication and being hooked up to the internet), it is possible to offer new services to end-users.
Attractive services lie in the domain of eHealth, where one can setup groups dedicated to patients with similar symptoms. Irdeto is interested in securing these services, both at the user and at the data warehouse site. Irdeto would consider both hardware solutions (preferably even by retrofitting already deployed hardware), and software security solutions using Irdeto’s Cloakware product line. A second business driver for Irdeto would be to enable these services in its middleware.
WP Leader: Thijs Veugen - TNO
Objectives: In a self-help group, members provide each other with various types of help, usually nonprofessional and nonmaterial, for a particular shared, usually burdensome, characteristic. The help may take the form of providing and evaluating relevant information, relating personal experiences, listening to and accepting others' experiences, providing sympathetic understanding and establishing social networks. Philips is a worldwide well-known provider for home monitoring and tele-healthcare system, which collects a large amount concept of self-help group so that patients can maximally benefit from their data.
WP Leader: Pieter Hartel - TU Twente