Milica Milutinovic

Commercial Home Assistance Services

In this chapter, the authors describe the software architecture of a commercially run home assistance system that allows patients or elderly people to stay longer at home. Since such systems often have to handle sensitive medical information, the protection of the privacy is a major concern. In addition, legislation often restricts access to health information to qualified persons (i.e. medical personnel), who are not always available in a commercial setting. The home assistance system can offer several services, ranging from scheduling necessary tasks and following up their execution, to monitoring the patient’s health status and responding promptly to requests for help or in case of emergency situations, and all this without the need to maintain personal medical data or identifying information about patients and caregivers in the home assistance centre.Through the use of ICT tools, such as the internet, portals, and telecommunication devices, the quality of healthcare has improved in local and global health; aiding in the development of a sustainable economy. Handbook of Research on ICTs for Quality Improvement in Healthcare and Social Services brings together a valuable research collection on ICT elements needed to improve communication and collaboration between global health institutes, public and private organisations, and foundations. Highlighting the adoption and success factors in the development of technologies for healthcare, this book is essential for IT professionals, technology solution providers, researchers, and students interested in technology and its relationship with healthcare and social services.

inShopnito: An Advanced yet Privacy-Friendly Mobile Shopping Application

Mobile Shopping Applications (MSAs) are rapidly gaining popularity. They enhance the shopping experience, by offering customized recommendations or incorporating customer loyalty programs. Although MSAs are quite effective at attracting new customers and binding existing ones to a retailers services, existing MSAs have several shortcomings. The data collection practices involved in MSAs and the lack of transparency thereof are important concerns for many customers. This paper presents inShopnito, a privacy-preserving mobile shopping application. All transactions made in inShopnito are unlinkable and anonymous. However, the system still offers the expected features from a modern MSA. Customers can take part in loyalty programs and earn or spend loyalty points and electronic vouchers. Furthermore, the MSA can suggest personalized recommendations even though the retailer cannot construct rich customer profiles. These profiles are managed on the smartphone and can be partially disclosed in order to get better, customized recommendations. Finally, we present an implementation called inShopnito, of which the security and performance is analyzed. In doing so, we show that it is possible to have a privacy-preserving MSA without having to sacrifice practicality.

PriMan: Facilitating the Development of Secure and Privacy-Preserving Applications

Security and privacy are essential in today’s information-driven society. However, security technologies and privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are often difficult to integrate in applications due to their inherent complexity and steep learning curve. In this paper, we present a flexible, technology agnostic development framework that facilitates the integration of security and privacy-preserving technologies into applications. Technology-specific configuration details are shifted from the application code to configuration policies. These policies are configured by domain experts independently from the application’s source code. We developed a prototype in Java, called PriMan, which runs on both desktops and Android based devices. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that PriMan introduces a low and acceptable overhead (e.g., less than one millisecond per operation). In addition, we compare PriMan with other, freely available solutions. PriMan facilitates the integration of PETs and security technologies in current and future applications.

Privacy-Preserving Public Transport Ticketing System

The public transport ticketing systems are undergoing significant changes in recent years. The tickets can now be issued and presented in digital form, significantly improving the user experience. The digital data is also used to improve the services’ efficiency. Travelling patterns and route occupancy can be analysed to adjust the frequency and coverage of the service. However, data recorded by the providers extends the information that is needed for simple analysis. The travel passes that are issued usually contain unique identifiers, allowing to trace the movement of users, which can even be linked to their identities. In order to tackle these privacy issues, we propose a novel, privacy-preserving ticketing system, based on a scheme for issuing and redemption of unlinkable certified tokens. The design also allows offering advanced services, such as reduction plans or monthly passes, without introducing privacy concerns. Even though the travellers’ actions cannot be linked, the service providers are given assurances against possible misuse, and are able to control the usage of the issued products. Additionally, experimental evaluation shows that the system performance is adequate for practical applications.

Privacy-preserving scheduling mechanism for ehealth systems

In this research, we designed a privacy-preserving scheduling service in eHealth applications. The scheduling service is envisioned as part of a pervasive home assistance system. The mechanisms that we propose protect all sensitive information that is handled by the system, but at the same time allow for a fair distribution of tasks and restricting the task assignment to caregivers with required qualifications. Therefore, this service can be offered by a commercial company without fear for privacy issues.

A generic architecture for integrating health monitoring and advanced care provisioning

This paper presents a novel approach for advanced personalized care and health services. It consists of four tiers and presents a high level of openness, privacy and manageability compared to existing systems. Moreover, the architecture is driven by realistic underlying business opportunities and is validated through the design of multiple scenarios.

Ethical aspects in eHealth – design of a privacy-friendly system

– The medical advances and historical fluctuations in the demographics are contributing to the rise of the average age. These changes are increasing the pressure to organize adequate care to a growing number of individuals. As a way to provide efficient and cost-effective care, eHealth systems are gaining importance. However, this trend is creating new ethical concerns. Major issues are privacy and patients’ control over their data. To deploy these systems on a large scale, they need to offer strict privacy protection. Even though many research proposals focus on eHealth systems and related ethical requirements, there is an evident lack of practical solutions for protecting users’ personal information. The purpose of this study is to explore the ethical considerations related to these systems and extract the privacy requirements. This paper also aims to put forth a system design which ensures appropriate privacy protection. , – This paper investigates the existing work in the area of eHealth systems and the related ethical considerations, which establish privacy as one of the main requirements. It lists the ethical requirements and data protection standards that a system needs to fulfil and uses them as a guideline for creating the proposed design. , – Even though privacy is considered to be a paramount aspect of the eHealth systems, the existing proposals do not tackle this issue from the outset of the design. Consequently, introducing privacy at the final stages of the system deployment imposes significant limitations and the provided data protection is not always to the standards expected by the users. , – This paper motivates the need for addressing ethical concerns in the eHealth domain with special focus on establishing strict privacy protection. It lists the privacy requirements and offers practical solutions for developing a privacy-friendly system and takes the approach of privacy-by-design. Additionally, the proposed design is evaluated against ethical principles as proposed in the existing literature. The aim is to show that technological advances can be used to improve quality and efficiency of care, while the usually raised concerns can be avoided.

An Efficient, Anonymous and Unlinkable Incentives Scheme

Incentives systems, such as loyalty schemes or reputation systems, are a popular way to encourage user actions or build a user-service provider relationship. In this paper, the authors describe uCentive, a privacy-preserving incentives scheme that allows users to earn and redeem incentives that cannot be linked to their identities or actions. In addition, users can prove ownership of their incentives without breaking unlinkability guarantees. uCentive also supports forward unlinkability-even if the users secrets are compromised, they cannot be linked to previous users actions.

An Advanced, Privacy-Friendly Loyalty System

Loyalty systems are a very popular service employed by retailers in order to measure and reward customer loyalty. However, currently deployed systems introduce many privacy risks, as the users’ data is completely controlled by retailers. In this work we tackle this issue by investigating the requirements posed on a privacy-friendly loyalty system and proposing a new design for a digital loyalty system. With this novel approach, the users are given more control over their data, but retailers are still able to measure their loyalty and perform (authorised) data collection. Additionally, the functionality of the design is flexible and allows for deployment of more advanced services.

Privacy-Preserving Mechanisms for Organizing Tasks in a Pervasive eHealth System

In this paper, we describe privacy-preserving protocols for a scheduling service in eHealth applications. The scheduling mechanism that we propose protects sensitive information that are handled by the system. However, it still allows for a fair distribution of tasks and restricting the task assignment to caregivers with specific qualifications.