Title: Exploring mobile health in a private online social network

Authors: Qurban A. Memon; Asma Fayes Mustafa

Addresses: EE Department, College of Engineering, UAE University, Al-Ain 15551, UAE ' EE Department, College of Engineering, UAE University, Al-Ain 15551, UAE

Abstract: Health information is very vulnerable. Certain individuals or corporate organisations will continue to steal it similar to bank account data once data is on wireless channels. Once health information is part of a social network, corresponding privacy issues also surface. Insufficiently trained employees at hospitals that pay less attention to creating a privacy-aware culture will suffer loss when mobile devices containing health information are lost, stolen or sniffed. In this work, a social network system is explored as a m-health system from a privacy perspective. A model is developed within a framework of data-driven privacy and implemented on Android operating system. In order to check feasibility of the proposed model, a prototype application is developed on Facebook for different services, including: i) sharing user location; ii) showing nearby friends; iii) calculating and sharing distance moved, and calories burned; iv) calculating, tracking and sharing user heart rate; etc.

Keywords: social networks; privacy; role-based access control; healthcare networks; healthcare social networks; m-health; mobile healthcare; private social networks; Facebook; electronic healthcare; e-health.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEH.2015.071643

International Journal of Electronic Healthcare, 2015 Vol.8 No.1, pp.51 - 75

Received: 29 Sep 2014
Accepted: 10 Jul 2015
Published online: 08 Sep 2015 *

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