Exploring Information Disclosure in Location-based Services: U.S. vs. German Populations

Location-based services (LBSs) have enabled users to obtain context-specific and personalized services owing to advances in mobile technologies and location analytics. Since location data are classified as personally identifiable, the sharing of locations on LBSs has privacy implications. We employ a privacy calculus lens to study users’ attitudes toward location-information sharing. We explore the role of cultural and institutional environments in users’ disclosure behaviors in two populations: the U.S. and Germany. Our results show similarities between the two samples, despite differences in cultural backgrounds and regulations. Contextualization is a highly valued benefit for LBS users, while monetary rewards are not yet foreseen as potential benefits. Location-information disclosure is not uniform; it varies depending on the sharing parties and the information extent or sensitivity. LBS users have high privacy risk perceptions and low trust in service providers and government regulations to protect their privacy and location-information from misuse

Health Information Systems in the Digital Health Ecosystem—Problems and Solutions for Ethics, Trust and Privacy

Digital health information systems (DHIS) are increasingly members of ecosystems, collecting, using and sharing a huge amount of personal health information (PHI), frequently without control and authorization through the data subject. From the data subject's perspective, there is frequently no guarantee and therefore no trust that PHI is processed ethically in Digital Health Ecosystems. This results in new ethical, privacy and trust challenges to be solved. The authors' objective is to find a combination of ethical principles, privacy and trust models, together enabling design, implementation of DHIS acting ethically, being trustworthy, and supporting the user's privacy needs. Research published in journals, conference proceedings, and standards documents is analyzed from the viewpoint of ethics, privacy and trust. In that context, systems theory and systems engineering approaches together with heuristic analysis are deployed. The ethical model proposed is a combination of consequentialism, professional medical ethics and utilitarianism. Privacy enforcement can be facilitated by defining it as health information specific contextual intellectual property right, where a service user can express their own privacy needs using computer-understandable policies. Thereby, privacy as a dynamic, indeterminate concept, and computational trust, deploys linguistic values and fuzzy mathematics. The proposed solution, combining ethical principles, privacy as intellectual property and computational trust models, shows a new way to achieve ethically acceptable, trustworthy and privacy-enabling DHIS and Digital Health Ecosystems

FedFTN: Personalized Federated Learning with Deep Feature Transformation Network for Multi-institutional Low-count PET Denoising

Low-count PET is an efficient way to reduce radiation exposure and acquisition time, but the reconstructed images often suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), thus affecting diagnosis and other downstream tasks. Recent advances in deep learning have shown great potential in improving low-count PET image quality, but acquiring a large, centralized, and diverse dataset from multiple institutions for training a robust model is difficult due to privacy and security concerns of patient data. Moreover, low-count PET data at different institutions may have different data distribution, thus requiring personalized models. While previous federated learning (FL) algorithms enable multi-institution collaborative training without the need of aggregating local data, addressing the large domain shift in the application of multi-institutional low-count PET denoising remains a challenge and is still highly under-explored. In this work, we propose FedFTN, a personalized federated learning strategy that addresses these challenges. FedFTN uses a local deep feature transformation network (FTN) to modulate the feature outputs of a globally shared denoising network, enabling personalized low-count PET denoising for each institution. During the federated learning process, only the denoising network's weights are communicated and aggregated, while the FTN remains at the local institutions for feature transformation. We evaluated our method using a large-scale dataset of multi-institutional low-count PET imaging data from three medical centers located across three continents, and showed that FedFTN provides high-quality low-count PET images, outperforming previous baseline FL reconstruction methods across all low-count levels at all three institutions.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, Accepted at Medical Image Analysis Journal (MedIA

Obfuscation and anonymization methods for locational privacy protection : a systematic literature review

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesThe mobile technology development combined with the business model of a majority of application companies is posing a potential risk to individuals’ privacy. Because the industry default practice is unrestricted data collection. Although, the data collection has virtuous usage in improve services and procedures; it also undermines user’s privacy. For that reason is crucial to learn what is the privacy protection mechanism state-of-art. Privacy protection can be pursued by passing new regulation and developing preserving mechanism. Understanding in what extent the current technology is capable to protect devices or systems is important to drive the advancements in the privacy preserving field, addressing the limits and challenges to deploy mechanism with a reasonable quality of Service-QoS level. This research aims to display and discuss the current privacy preserving schemes, its capabilities, limitations and challenges

A Cascade Framework for Privacy-Preserving Point-of-Interest Recommender System

Point-of-interest (POI) recommender systems (RSes) have gained significant popularity in recent years due to the prosperity of location-based social networks (LBSN). However, in the interest of personalization services, various sensitive contextual information is collected, causing potential privacy concerns. This paper proposes a cascaded privacy-preserving POI recommendation (CRS) framework that protects contextual information such as user comments and locations. We demonstrate a minimized trade-off between the privacy-preserving feature and prediction accuracy by applying a semi-decentralized model to real-world datasets

Towards Adaptive Technology in Routine Mental Healthcare

This paper summarizes the information technology-related research findings after 5 years with the INTROducing Mental health through Adaptive Technology project. The aim was to improve mental healthcare by introducing new technologies for adaptive interventions in mental healthcare through interdisciplinary research and development. We focus on the challenges related to internet-delivered psychological treatments, emphasising artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and software engineering. We present the main research findings, the developed artefacts, and lessons learned from the project before outlining directions for future research. The main findings from this project are encapsulated in a reference architecture that is used for establishing an infrastructure for adaptive internet-delivered psychological treatment systems in clinical contexts. The infrastructure is developed by introducing an interdisciplinary design and development process inspired by domain-driven design, user-centred design, and the person based approach for intervention design. The process aligns the software development with the intervention design and illustrates their mutual dependencies. Finally, we present software artefacts produced within the project and discuss how they are related to the proposed reference architecture. Our results indicate that the proposed development process, the reference architecture and the produced software can be practical means of designing adaptive mental health care treatments in correspondence with the patients’ needs and preferences. In summary, we have created the initial version of an information technology infrastructure to support the development and deployment of Internet-delivered mental health interventions with inherent support for data sharing, data analysis, reusability of treatment content, and adaptation of intervention based on user needs and preferences.publishedVersio

ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL: INFORMATION SECURITY AND INFORMATION PRIVACY FOR GENOMIC CLOUD SERVICES

Most extant genomic cloud services strive to maximize information security and information privacy protection thereby neglecting the diversity of information practices in genomic research. Such a one-size-fits-all approach is not expedient and decreases the overall system usability and performance. While there is growing awareness that employed information security and information privacy measures must adapt to information security and information privacy requirements inherent to infor-mation practices, limited design knowledge exists on how to actually design genomic cloud services capable to account for differences in information practices in genomic research. In this research-in-progress, we propose a model for genomic cloud services that dynamically adapt to the diverse infor-mation security and information privacy requirements in genomic research. Our research contributes to the scientific knowledge base by capturing design knowledge for secure, privacy-preserving, and usable genomic cloud services, accounting for conflicts between information security and information privacy, and fostering understanding of information privacy as a context-sensitive construct

Next-Gen Security: Leveraging Advanced Technologies for Social Medical Public Healthcare Resilience

The healthcare industry is undergoing a significant change as it incorporates advanced technologies to strengthen its security infrastructure and improve its ability to withstand current challenges and  explores the important overlap between security, technology, and public health. The introductory section presents a thorough overview, highlighting the current status of public healthcare and emphasizing the crucial importance of security in protecting confidential medical data. This statement highlights the current difficulties encountered by social medical public healthcare systems and emphasizes the urgent need to utilize advanced technologies to strengthen their ability to adapt and recover. The systematic literature review explores a wide range of studies, providing insight into the various aspects of healthcare security. This text examines conventional security methods, exposes their constraints, and advances the discussion by examining cutting-edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), and Biometric Security Solutions. Every technology is carefully examined to determine its ability to strengthen healthcare systems against cyber threats and breaches, guaranteeing the confidentiality and accuracy of patient data. The methodology section provides a clear explanation of the research design, the process of selecting participants, and the strategies used for analyzing the data. The research seeks to evaluate the present security situation and determine the best methods for incorporating advanced technologies into healthcare systems, using either qualitative or quantitative methods. The following sections elucidate the security challenges inherent in social medical public healthcare, encompassing cyber threats and privacy concerns. Drawing on case studies, the paper illustrates successful implementations of advanced technologies in healthcare security, distilling valuable lessons and best practices. The recommendations section goes beyond the technical domain, exploring the policy implications and strategies for technological implementation. The exploration of regulatory frameworks, legal considerations, and ethical dimensions is conducted to provide guidance for the smooth integration of advanced technologies into healthcare systems. Healthcare professionals are encouraged to participate in training and awareness programs to ensure a comprehensive and efficient implementation. To summarize, the paper combines the results, highlighting the importance of utilizing advanced technologies to strengthen the security framework of social medical public healthcare. The significance of healthcare resilience is emphasized, and potential areas for future research are delineated. This research is an important resource that offers valuable insights and guidance for stakeholders, policymakers, and technologists who are dealing with the intricate field of healthcare security in the age of advanced technologies. DOI: https://doi.org/10.52710/seejph.48

When explainable AI meets IoT applications for supervised learning

This paper introduces a novel and complete framework for solving different Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which explores eXplainable AI (XAI), deep learning, and evolutionary computation. The IoT data coming from different sensors is first converted into an image database using the Gamian angular field. The images are trained using VGG16, where XAI technology and hyper-parameter optimization are introduced. Thus, analyzing the impact of the different input values in the output and understanding the different weights of a deep learning model used in the learning process helps us to increase interpretation of the overall process of IoT systems. Extensive testing was conducted to demonstrate the performance of our developed model on two separate IoT datasets. Results show the efficiency of the proposed approach compared to the baseline approaches in terms of both runtime and accuracy.publishedVersio

When explainable AI meets IoT applications for supervised learning

This paper introduces a novel and complete framework for solving different Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which explores eXplainable AI (XAI), deep learning, and evolutionary computation. The IoT data coming from different sensors is first converted into an image database using the Gamian angular field. The images are trained using VGG16, where XAI technology and hyper-parameter optimization are introduced. Thus, analyzing the impact of the different input values in the output and understanding the different weights of a deep learning model used in the learning process helps us to increase interpretation of the overall process of IoT systems. Extensive testing was conducted to demonstrate the performance of our developed model on two separate IoT datasets. Results show the efficiency of the proposed approach compared to the baseline approaches in terms of both runtime and accuracy.publishedVersio