Security Group TU/e

Trusted Healthcare Services (THeCS) is a Dutch national project in the COMMIT program with 11 partners including representatives from industry, Dutch research institutes, Dutch universities and hospitals. The project addresses trust as one of the key issues for new eHealth services. Novel eHealth services include home healthcare and rehabilitation services as well as patient portals in professional medical world. In these services, healthcare providers need to trust the patient data they obtain remotely from the measurement devices deployed in patient’s home. Additionally, patients need to trust the service in general, as well as that the service will properly protect their personal data. Standard internet security techniques provide authentication and encryption of the communication with a service provider. However they do not provide the user with means to judge the trustworthiness and control how a service provider will actually use personal information. The patient must be able to make an informed decision to trust a service provider on the basis of facts, such as reputation, and security attributes. THeCS project aims to create measurable and enforceable trust. This notion is new for electronic healthcare services (and for internet services in general), and it is fundamental for their success. This project creates new techniques to measure and control the reliability and use of (healthcare) information. These techniques allow users and service providers to trust each other and to benefit from these new services. In a healthcare setting, trust is of special relevance because of the sensitive and personal nature of health information and because of the possibly very adverse consequences of late or incorrect decisions related to one's health.

• Project website
• COMMIT

• Elisa Costante
• Alexandru Ionut Egner
• Milan Petkovic
• Stefan Thaler
• Sokratis Vavilis
• Nicola Zannone