Amit S. Baxi

A privacy framework for mobile health and home-care systems

In this paper, we consider the challenge of preserving patient privacy in the context of mobile healthcare and home-care systems, that is, the use of mobile computing and communications technologies in the delivery of healthcare or the provision of at-home medical care and assisted living. This paper makes three primary contributions. First, we compare existing privacy frameworks, identifying key differences and shortcomings. Second, we identify a privacy framework for mobile healthcare and home-care systems. Third, we extract a set of privacy properties intended for use by those who design systems and applications for mobile healthcare and home-care systems, linking them back to the privacy principles. Finally, we list several important research questions that the community should address. We hope that the privacy framework in this paper can help to guide the researchers and developers in this community, and that the privacy properties provide a concrete foundation for privacy-sensitive systems and applications for mobile healthcare and home-care systems.

Jog falls: a pervasive healthcare platform for diabetes management

This paper presents Jog Falls, an end to end system to manage diabetes that blends activity and energy expenditure monitoring, diet-logging, and analysis of health data for patients and physicians. It describes the architectural details, sensing modalities, user interface and the physicians backend portal. We show that the body wearable sensors accurately estimate the energy expenditure across a varied set of active and sedentary states through the fusion of heart rate and accelerometer data. The GUI ensures continuous engagement with the patient by showing the activity goals, current and past activity states and dietary records along with its nutritional values. The system also provides a comprehensive and unbiased view of the patients activity and food intake trends to the physician, hence increasing his/her effectiveness in coaching the patient. We conducted a user study using Jog Falls at Manipal University, a leading medical school in India. The study involved 15 participants, who used the system for 63 days. The results indicate a strong positive correlation between weight reduction and hours of use of the system.