On the Privacy, Security and Safety of Blood Pressure and Diabetes Apps

Part 8: Mobile and Cloud Services SecurityInternational audienceMobile health (mHealth) apps are an ideal tool for monitoring and tracking long-term health conditions. In this paper, we examine whether mHealth apps succeed in ensuring the privacy, security, and safety of the health data entrusted to them. We investigate 154 apps from Android app stores using both automatic code and metadata analysis and a manual analysis of functionality and data leakage. Our study focuses on hypertension and diabetes, two common health conditions that require careful tracking of personal health data.We find that many apps do not provide privacy policies or safe communications, are implemented in an insecure fashion, fail basic input validation tests and often have overall low code quality which suggests additional security and safety risks. We conclude with recommendations for App Stores, App developers, and end users

Increasing the Capacity of Primary Care Through Enabling Technology.

Primary care is the foundation of effective and high-quality health care. The role of primary care clinicians has expanded to encompass coordination of care across multiple providers and management of more patients with complex conditions. Enabling technology has the potential to expand the capacity for primary care clinicians to provide integrated, accessible care that channels expertise to the patient and brings specialty consultations into the primary care clinic. Furthermore, technology offers opportunities to engage patients in advancing their health through improved communication and enhanced self-management of chronic conditions. This paper describes enabling technologies in four domains (the body, the home, the community, and the primary care clinic) that can support the critical role primary care clinicians play in the health care system. It also identifies challenges to incorporating these technologies into primary care clinics, care processes, and workflow

M-health review: joining up healthcare in a wireless world

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver health and social care. This trend is bound to continue as providers (whether public or private) strive to deliver better care to more people under conditions of severe budgetary constraint

Virtual Clinical Trials: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Virtual clinical trials have entered the medical research landscape. Today’s clinical trials recruit subjects online, obtain informed consent online, send treatments such as medications or devices to the subjects’ homes, and require subjects to record their responses online. Virtual clinical trials could be a way to democratize clinical research and circumvent geographical limitations by allowing access to clinical research for people who live far from traditional medical research centers. But virtual clinical trials also depart dramatically from traditional medical research studies in ways that can harm individuals and the public at large. This article addresses the issues presented by virtual clinical trials with regard to: (1) recruitment methods; (2) informed consent; (3) confidentiality; (4) potential risks to the subjects; and (5) the safety and efficacy of treatments that are approved

Integrating Information Technology in Healthcare: Recent Developments, Challenges, and Future Prospects for Urban and Regional Health

The use of technology in healthcare has become increasingly popular in recent years, with the potential to improve how healthcare is delivered, patient outcomes, and cost-effectiveness. This review paper provides an overview of how technology has been used in healthcare, particularly in cities and for personalized medicine. The paper discusses different ways technology is being used in healthcare, such as electronic health records, telemedicine, remote monitoring, medical imaging, wearable devices, and artificial intelligence. It also looks at the challenges and problems that come with using technology in healthcare, such as keeping patient data private and secure, making sure different technology systems can work together, and ensuring patients are comfortable using technology. In addition, the paper explores the potential of technology in healthcare, including improving how easily patients can get care, the quality of care they receive, and the cost of care. It also talks about how technology can help personalize care to individual patients. Finally, the paper summarizes the main points, makes recommendations for healthcare providers and policymakers, and suggests directions for future research. Overall, this review shows how technology can be used to improve healthcare, while also acknowledging the challenges that come with using technology in this way

Apps as artefacts: towards a critical perspective on mobile health and medical apps

Although over 100,000 health and medical mobile apps have been placed on the market, few critical social analyses have been yet undertaken of the role of these apps in healthcare, preventive health and health promotion. In this article I present an argument for approaching the study of mobile apps as sociocultural artefacts, focusing specifically on those that have been developed on health and medical topics. This perspective acknowledges that apps are digital objects that are the products of human decision-making, underpinned by tacit assumptions, norms and discourses already circulating in the social and cultural contexts in which they are generated, marketed and used. First, I provide the context, by discussing the gradual digitisation of health and medical information since the advent of the Internet and the emergence of health and medical apps as one of the latest developments. Second, I discuss how a critical perspective may be employed to analyse the social, cultural and political dimensions of health and medical apps. Finally I illustrate how such an approach may be applied by giving a case study of an analysis of the top 10 ranked health and medical apps on the Apple App Store on one day, outlining some major themes and discourses that emerge

Addressing data accuracy and information integrity in mHealth using ML

The aim of the study was finding a way in which Machine Learning can be applied in mHealth Solutions to detect inaccurate data that can potentially harm patients. The result was an algorithm that classified accurate and inaccurate data

Exploring the need for a suitable privacy framework for mHealth when managing chronic diseases

The widespread rises in chronic illnesses (e.g., diabetes and high blood pressure) have resulted in the need to find more efficient ways of managing patients with these conditions. One such way is by the use of mobile health (mHealth) technologies that can gather real-time data from patients and monitor them from a distance, removing the need to be at a medical facility. These technologies can be an integral part of intelligent healthcare environments (e.g., smart homes to monitor and assist elderly patients) which are essential to reducing healthcare costs and improving efficiency. The use of mHealth, however, brings various privacy concerns and challenges. This paper reviews and examines the challenges of preserving user privacy in the context of using mHealth to manage chronic diseases. The paper first discusses mHealth, its importance in managing chronic diseases, and the associated privacy concerns. Second, the paper compares the existing privacy frameworks applicable to mHealth. Third, the key principles gathered from the frameworks are analysed in the context of their suitability for enabling adequate privacy when using mHealth for managing chronic diseases. Finally, the paper argues that a new privacy framework is needed for mHealth in the context of managing chronic diseases

The Role of the Internet of Things in Health Care: A Systematic and Comprehensive Study

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an emerging trend and has significant potential to replace other technologies, where researchers consider it as the future of the internet. It has given tremendous support and become the building blocks in the development of important cyber-physical systems and it is being severed in a variety of application domains, including healthcare. A methodological evolution of the Internet of Things, enabled it to extend to the physical world beyond the electronic world by connecting miscellaneous devices through the internet, thus making everything is connected. In recent years it has gained higher attention for its potential to alleviate the strain on the healthcare sector caused by the rising and aging population along with the increase in chronic diseases and global pandemics. This paper surveys about various usages of IoT healthcare technologies and reviews the state of the art services and applications, recent trends in IoT based healthcare solutions, and various challenges posed including security and privacy issues, which researchers, service providers and end users need to pay higher attention. Further, this paper discusses how innovative IoT enabled technologies like cloud computing, fog computing, blockchain, and big data can be used to leverage modern healthcare facilities and mitigate the burden on healthcare resources