PPAMH: A Novel Privacy-Preserving Approach for Mobile Healthcare

Mobile technologies are transforming the way providers and patients communicate. Thanks to mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and patient monitoring devices, real time patient information is easily provided to physicians; patients are integrated in managing their own health by measuring their blood pressure, exercise and food diaries, setting reminders on when to take medicines and so on. However, although mobile healthcare offers many benefits, there is also a downside to using these mobile technologies. Privacy is among the primary issues to address. In effect, Patients' sensitive medical data can be exchanged between different parties including physicians, patients with the same diseases, laboratories, pharmacies. Furthermore, since mobile devices are not only used for healthcare purposes, new privacy breaches may occur. Thus, patients become very concerned about "what happen" to their data. In this paper, we present a Privacy-Preserving Approach for Mobile Healthcare named PPIAMH. The proposed solution allows patients to control the disclosure of their sensitive medical data while using their mobile devices based on an intelligent mobile application which predict their privacy preferences easily.