Managing disclosure of personal health information in smart home healthcare

Abstract

Recent advances in ubiquitous computing have evoked the prospect of real-time monitoring of people's health in context-aware homes. Home is the most private place for people and health information is of highly intimate nature. Therefore, users-at-home must have means to benefit from home healthcare and preserve privacy as well. However, most smart home healthcare systems currently lack support for privacy management for home inhabitants. In this paper, we analyze the privacy needs of smart home inhabitants utilizing a healthcare system and present a conceptual framework to manage disclosure of their personal health information. The proposed framework supports sharing the most meaningful detail of personal health information at different time granularities with different recipients in different contexts. To relieve the burden of configuration, default disclosure settings are provided, and to ensure end-user's control over disclosure, the option to override default settings is included. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.