Leonardo H. Iwaya

Mobile health in emerging countries: A survey of research initiatives in Brazil

OBJECTIVE To conduct a comprehensive survey of mobile health (mHealth) research initiatives in Brazil, discussing current challenges, gaps, opportunities and tendencies. METHODS Systematic review of publicly available electronic documents related to mHealth, including scientific publications, technical reports and descriptions of commercial products. Specifically, 42 projects are analyzed and classified according to their goals. This analysis considers aspects such as security features provided (if any), the health condition that are focus of attention, the main providers involved in the projects development and deployment, types of devices used, target users, where the projects are tested and/or deployed, among others. RESULTS The study shows a large number (86%) of mHealth solutions focused on the following categories: health surveys, surveillance, patient records and monitoring. Meanwhile, treatment compliance, awareness raising and decision support systems are less explored. The main providers of solutions are the universities (56%) and health units (32%), with considerable cooperation between such entities. Most applications have physicians (55%) and Community Health Agents (CHAs) (33%) as targeted users, the latter being important elements in nation-wide governmental health programs. Projects focused on health managers, however, are a minority (5%). The majority of projects do not focus on specific diseases but rather general health (57%), although solutions for hearth conditions are reasonably numerous (21%). Finally, the lack of security mechanisms in the majority of the surveyed solutions (52%) may hinder their deployment in the field due to the lack of compliance with general regulations for medical data handling. CONCLUSION There are currently many mHealth initiatives in Brazil, but some areas have not been much explored, such as solutions for treatment compliance and awareness raising, as well as decision support systems. Another research trend worth exploring refers to creating interoperable security mechanisms, especially for widely explored mHealth categories such as health surveys, patient records and monitoring. Challenges for the expansion of mHealth solutions, both in number and coverage, include the further involvement of health managers in the deployment of such solutions and in coordinating efforts among health and research institutions interested in the mHealth trend, possibly exploring the widespread presence of CHAs around the country as users of such technology.

Georeferenced and secure mobile health system for large scale data collection in primary care

INTRODUCTION Mobile health consists in applying mobile devices and communication capabilities for expanding the coverage and improving the effectiveness of health care programs. The technology is particularly promising for developing countries, in which health authorities can take advantage of the flourishing mobile market to provide adequate health care to underprivileged communities, especially primary care. In Brazil, the Primary Care Information System (SIAB) receives primary health care data from all regions of the country, creating a rich database for health-related action planning. Family Health Teams (FHTs) collect this data in periodic visits to families enrolled in governmental programs, following an acquisition procedure that involves filling in paper forms. This procedure compromises the quality of the data provided to health care authorities and slows down the decision-making process. OBJECTIVES To develop a mobile system (GeoHealth) that should address and overcome the aforementioned problems and deploy the proposed solution in a wide underprivileged metropolitan area of a major city in Brazil. METHODS The proposed solution comprises three main components: (a) an Application Server, with a database containing family health conditions; and two clients, (b) a Web Browser running visualization tools for management tasks, and (c) a data-gathering device (smartphone) to register and to georeference the family health data. A data security framework was designed to ensure the security of data, which was stored locally and transmitted over public networks. RESULTS The system was successfully deployed at six primary care units in the city of Sao Paulo, where a total of 28,324 families/96,061 inhabitants are regularly followed up by government health policies. The health conditions observed from the population covered were: diabetes in 3.40%, hypertension (age >40) in 23.87% and tuberculosis in 0.06%. This estimated prevalence has enabled FHTs to set clinical appointments proactively, with the aim of confirming or detecting cases of non-communicable diseases more efficiently, based on real-time information. CONCLUSION The proposed system has the potential to improve the efficiency of primary care data collection and analysis. In terms of direct costs, it can be considered a low-cost solution, with an estimated additional monthly cost of U

A Design for Assembly Application with Dynamic Information Retrieval from Case Database

0.040 per inhabitant of the region covered, or approximately U

Systematic Literature Review on Usability of Firewall Configuration

0.106 per person, considering only those currently enrolled in the system.

Classifying Security Threats in Cloud Networking

Design for Assembly (DFA) is a Concurrent Engineering constituent that gained a lot of attention due to fast and measurable benefits. The main principle of DFA is to foresee assembly problems at the design stage based on the experience regarding functionality, materials and machine availability. The work presented in this paper, named RFA - Redesign for Assembly, adds a way to explicitly register and retrieve experiences as part of the design process. It starts from an initial design, then RFA leads the designer through a detailed assessment towards an improved design according to previous experiences. Experience representation was done using a Group Technology classification concept that helps assign a primary-key for a Case Based Teaching underlying system. A supporting system has been implemented in order to try out RFA. DFA scholars have used RFA and proved that experience retrieval is easily and intuitively incorporated in the design process. The paper presents a study about the DFA methodology, reviews existing solutions (methods and software) from the literature and details the RFA architecture, implementation and tests. RFA shows potential for a new design culture based on knowledge sharing, but also, as a repository for a very valuable asset, i.e. problem-oriented assembly-related design experience.

Ontology-Based Obfuscation and Anonymisation for Privacy

Firewalls are network security components that handle incoming and outgoing network traffic based on a set of rules. The process of correctly configuring a firewall is complicated and prone to error, and it worsens as the network complexity grows. A poorly configured firewall may result in major security threats; in the case of a network firewall, an organization’s security could be endangered, and in the case of a personal firewall, an individual computer’s security is threatened. A major reason for poorly configured firewalls, as pointed out in the literature, is usability issues. Our aim is to identify existing solutions that help professional and non-professional users to create and manage firewall configuration files, and to analyze the proposals in respect of usability. A systematic literature review with a focus on the usability of firewall configuration is presented in the article. Its main goal is to explore what has already been done in this field. In the primary selection procedure, 1,202 articles were retrieved and then screened. The secondary selection led us to 35 articles carefully chosen for further investigation, of which 14 articles were selected and summarized. As main contributions, we propose a taxonomy of existing solutions as well as a synthesis and in-depth discussion about the state of the art in firewall usability. Among the main findings, we perceived that there is a lack (or even an absence) of usability evaluation or user studies to validate the proposed models. Although all articles are related to the topic of usability, none of them clearly defines it, and only a few actually employ usability design principles and/or guidelines.

A MOOC on Privacy by Design and the GDPR.

A central component of managing risks in cloud computing is to understand the nature of security threats. The relevance of security concerns are evidenced by the efforts from both the academic community and technological organizations such as NIST, ENISA and CSA, to investigate security threats and vulnerabilities related to cloud systems. Provisioning secure virtual networks (SVNs) in a multi-tenant environment is a fundamental aspect to ensure trust in public cloud systems and to encourage their adoption. However, comparing existing SVN-oriented solutions is a difficult task due to the lack of studies summarizing the main concerns of network virtualization and providing a comprehensive list of threats those solutions should cover. To address this issue, this paper presents a threat classification for cloud networking, describing threat categories and attack scenarios that should be taken into account when designing, comparing, or categorizing solutions. The classification is based o n the CSA threat report, building upon studies and surveys from the specialized literature to extend the CSA list of threats and to allow a more detailed analysis of cloud network virtualization issues.

SecourHealth: A Delay-Tolerant Security Framework for Mobile Health Data Collection

Healthcare Information Systems typically fall into the group of systems in which the need of data sharing conflicts with the privacy. A myriad of these systems have to, however, constantly communicate among each other. One of the ways to address the dilemma between data sharing and privacy is to use data obfuscation by lowering data accuracy to guarantee patient’s privacy while retaining its usefulness. Even though many obfuscation methods are able to handle numerical values, the obfuscation of non-numerical values (e.g., textual information) is not as trivial, yet extremely important to preserve data utility along the process. In this paper, we preliminary investigate how to exploit ontologies to create obfuscation mechanism for releasing personal and electronic health records (PHR and EHR) to selected audiences with different degrees of obfuscation. Data minimisation and access control should be supported to enforce different actors, e.g., doctors, nurses and managers, will get access to no more information than needed for their tasks. Besides that, ontology-based obfuscation can also be used for the particular case of data anonymisation. In such case, the obfuscation has to comply with a specific criteria to provide anonymity, so that the data set could be safely released. This research contributes to: state the problems in the area; review related privacy and data protection legal requirements; discuss ontology-based obfuscation and anonymisation methods; and define relevant healthcare use cases. As a result, we present the early concept of our Ontology-based Data Sharing Service (O-DSS) that enforces patient’s privacy by means of obfuscation and anonymisation functions.

Method and Apparatus for Securing a Connection in a Communications Network

In this paper we describe how we designed a massive open online course (mooc) on Privacy by Design with a focus on how to achieve compliance with the eu gdpr principles and requirements in it engineering and management. This mooc aims at educating both professionals and undergraduate students, i.e., target groups with distinct educational needs and requirements, within a single course structure. We discuss why developing and publishing such a course is a timely decision and fulfills the current needs of the professional and undergraduate education. The mooc is organized in five modules, each of them with its own learning outcomes and activities. The modules focus on different aspects of the gdpr that data protection officers have to be knowledgeable about, ranging from the legal basics, to data protection impact assessment methods, and privacy-enhancing technologies. The modules were delivered using hypertext, digital content and three video production styles: slides with voice-over, talking heads and interviews. The main contribution of this work is the roadmap on how to design a highly relevant mooc on privacy by design and the gdpr aimed at an heterogeneous audience.