Enhancing NAC-ABE to Support Access Control for mHealth Applications and Beyond

Name-based access control (NAC) over NDN provides fine-grained data confidentiality and access control by encrypting and signing data at the time of data production. NAC utilizes specially crafted naming conventions to define and enforce access control policies. NAC-ABE, an extension to NAC, uses an attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme to support access control with improved scalability and flexibility. However, existing NAC-ABE libraries are based on ciphertext-policy ABE (CP-ABE), which requires knowledge of the access policy when encrypting data packets. In some applications, including mHealth, the data access policy is unknown at the time of data generation, while data attributes and properties are known. In this paper, we present an extension to the existing NDN-ABE library which can be used by mHealth and other applications to enforce fine-granularity access control in data sharing. We also discuss the challenges we encountered during the application deployment, and remaining open issues together with potential solution directions

Designing Social Networking Mobile App for Diabetes Management

The knowledge required for diabetes prevention and management among the rural people in developing countries vastly remains in the state of non-existence. To address this, a diabetic knowledge sharing platform, as an effective means for diabetes prevention, control, and treatment, can play role in increasing diabetes awareness and literacy. Currently researchers have emphasized the scope of peer-led learning by knowledge sharing on social media platforms in healthcare context. Therefore, by identifying this scope, we have prototyped a mobile app integrated with social media features to enable diabetic patients for cost-effective peer-led learning, knowledge sharing, and awareness building. In this process, we resorted to follow the cycles and guidelines as proposed in the Information System Research (ISR) framework for identifying users\u27 needs and preferences as well as building the theoretical foundation for the design of an app. This study demonstrates that the users had positive response and well acceptance to this prototype app as a medium for peer-led for diabetes management. Based on the findings, the researchers are optimistic about the potentiality of the app for a wider scale adoption by diabetic patients as a cost-effective peer-led learning platform

Secure Sharing of Spatio-Temporal Data through Name-based Access Control

Named Data Networking (NDN) is proposed as a future Internet architecture, which provides name-based data publishing and fetching primitive. Compared to TCP/IP, the benefits of NDN are as follows. NDN removes the need to manage IP address; NDN provides semantically meaningful and structured names; NDN has a stateful and name-based forwarding plane; NDN supports data-centric security and in-network caching. Name-based Access Control is an access control solution proposed over NDN, which is a content-based access control by encrypting data at the time of production directly without relying on a third-party service(i.e., Cloud storage), utilizes NDN’s hierarchical naming convention to express access control policy, and enables automation of key distribution. As more and more mobile data (e.g., mobile-health data) are generated dynamically and continuously over time and space, data owners often want to share his data with others for data analysis or healthcare, etc. To protect their privacy, they may want to share a subset of data based on their requirements with time and/or space restrictions. An effective and secure access control solution is required to ensure only authorized users can access certain data with fine granularity. Inspired by Named-based Access Control scheme, we take into account the data attributes (time, location) to make access decisions. In this work, we introduce a spatio-temporal access control scheme that allows data owners to specify access control policy and limit data access to a given time interval and/or location area. Specifically, we design a hierarchically structured naming convention to express fine-grained access control policy on spatio-temporal data, werealize a publish-subscribe functionality based on PSync for real-time data stream sharing, we develop a practical spatial-temporal data access control prototype based on NDN codebase. Moreover, we run experiments using Mini-NDN to evaluate the performance of sharing historical data from storage and sharing.data in real time

The Social Life of Health Information, 2011

Presents survey findings about trends in use of the Internet, including social networking sites, hospital and doctor review sites, and mobile apps to seek, share, or monitor health-related information among adults in general, patients, and caregivers

Global Health Care: Implications for Nursing

Nurses are responding to global health care crisis needs by providing care to diverse populations while expanding their understanding of cultural, economic, political, social, and environmental factors impacting healthcare. Educational institutions are placing emphasis on global health learning and providing international experiences for nursing students to view population health beyond borders increasing knowledge of health determinants alongside their global nursing counterparts

THaW publications

In 2013, the National Science Foundation\u27s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program awarded a Frontier grant to a consortium of four institutions, led by Dartmouth College, to enable trustworthy cybersystems for health and wellness. As of this writing, the Trustworthy Health and Wellness (THaW) project\u27s bibliography includes more than 130 significant publications produced with support from the THaW grant; these publications document the progress made on many fronts by the THaW research team. The collection includes dissertations, theses, journal papers, conference papers, workshop contributions and more. The bibliography is organized as a Zotero library, which provides ready access to citation materials and abstracts and associates each work with a URL where it may be found, cluster (category), several content tags, and a brief annotation summarizing the work\u27s contribution. For more information about THaW, visit thaw.org

Using Social Media to Support Requirements Gathering When Users are Not Available

The use of mobile health applications has surged in numbers since the advent of smart phones a decade ago. Yet, many mobile applications suffer from low engagement due to poor application design. This could be partially due to the primary users of an eHealth applications being time poor and inaccessible to software developers due to their complex health needs. This study investigated the needs of a complex cohort to establish how an eHealth application could provide support. This investigation used social media to reach the cohort ‘where they were’, without needing to undertake traditional software requirement extraction. The study demonstrated that social media can be used as an effective research tool, not only as a data collection tool to gain insight for a possible mobile application prototype development, but it has demonstrated that social media is a feasible participation tool of User Centred Design (UCD) engagement

Implementation of a Community Emergency Security Alert System

Emergency alert and response is carried out in different ways around the world. Governments, corporate bodies and individuals take emergencies very seriously and continue to develop ingenious ways of responding to emergencies very swiftly. Most Urban areas have well-developed emergency response systems but this is not true of rural and sub-urban settlements. Security risk keeps increasing by the day due to rapid population growth. This is particularly true at the grassroots or community level. This paper proposes a very effective and economical way of alerting a community to all kinds of security emergencies. It incorporates the use of a mobile application that was codenamed “CEMAS” (Community Emergency Alarm System). The mobile application with a “Panic button” on it provides all inhabitants of the community with the means of triggering two SMS-activated central alarms. The first alarm is located at the community center and the second at the community police station. The central alarm system is activated by pressing the “Panic Button” whenever there is a security threat. The designed and implemented system worked satisfactorily well

Implementation of a Community Emergency Security Alert System

Emergency alert and response is carried out in different ways around the world. Governments, corporate bodies and individuals take emergencies very seriously and continue to develop ingenious ways of responding to emergencies very swiftly. Most Urban areas have well-developed emergency response systems but this is not true of rural and sub-urban settlements. Security risk keeps increasing by the day due to rapid population growth. This is particularly true at the grassroots or community level. This paper proposes a very effective and economical way of alerting a community to all kinds of security emergencies. It incorporates the use of a mobile application that was codenamed “CEMAS” (Community Emergency Alarm System). The mobile application with a “Panic button” on it provides all inhabitants of the community with the means of triggering two SMS-activated central alarms. The first alarm is located at the community center and the second at the community police station. The central alarm system is activated by pressing the “Panic Button” whenever there is a security threat. The designed and implemented system worked satisfactorily well