mHealth
Thread 2

Mobile medical sensor devices are rapidly emerging as one promising way to monitor patient health (and the quality of patient care) while improving convenience to the patient (and reducing the cost of care) by allowing patients to spend more time out of the hospital. Today, thousands of patients already use technology at home to communicate with healthcare staff and to measure and report health data.

In the future, mobile sensors could keep track of everyday behaviors that are reflective of physical and physiological health states and predictive of future health problems. We expect that wearable, portable, and even embeddable sensors will overcome some of the challenges of existing approaches and enable long-term continuous medical monitoring for many purposes: for outpatients with chronic medical conditions (such as diabetes), individuals seeking to change behavior (such as losing weight), physicians needing to quantify and detect behavioral aberrations for early diagnosis (such as depression), or athletes wishing to monitor their condition and performance.

This research thread addresses fundamental security challenges related to collection, processing, and medical use of data from sensors worn by outpatients. With a patient-centric point of view, we focus on two critical issues of concern to the patient: privacy and usability. The challenge is to provide usable devices that respect patient privacy while also retaining data quality and accessibility required for the medical purpose it serves.

Research

• Sasikanth Avancha and Amit Baxi and David Kotz. "Privacy in mobile technology for personal healthcare". ACM Computing Surveys, 45(1), March 2012. Accepted for publication. (Abstract) (BibTeX) [PDF] Copyright © 2013 by ACM. 
• Cory Cornelius and Zachary Marois and Jacob Sorber and Ron Peterson and Shrirang Mare and David Kotz. Passive Biometrics for Pervasive Wearable Devices (Poster paper). In Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile), February, 2012. ACM Press. (Abstract) (BibTeX) [PDF] Copyright © 2012 by the authors.
• Jacob Sorber and Minho Shin and Ronald Peterson and Cory Cornelius and Shrirang Mare and Aarathi Prasad and Zachary Marois and Emma Smithayer and David Kotz. An Amulet for trustworthy wearable mHealth. In Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile), pages 7:1-7:6, February, 2012. DOI 10.1145/2162081.2162092.
• Aarathi Prasad, "Exposing Privacy Concerns in mHealth Data Sharing." Dartmouth Technical Report TR2012-711, February 2012.
• Shrirang Mare and Jacob Sorber and Minho Shin and Cory Cornelius and David Kotz. Adapt-lite: Privacy-aware, secure, and efficient mHealth sensing. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES), pages 137-142, October, 2011. DOI 10.1145/2046556.2046574. (Abstract) (BibTeX) [PDF] Copyright © 2011 by ACM. See also earlier version.
• Shrirang Mare and Jacob Sorber and Minho Shin and Cory Cornelius and David Kotz. Hide-n-Sense: Privacy-aware secure mHealth sensing. Technical Report TR2011-702, Dept. of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, September, 2011. (Abstract) (BibTeX) [PDF] Copyright © 2011 by the authors. See also earlier version. See also later version.
• Shrirang Mare and Jacob Sorber and Minho Shin and Cory Cornelius and David Kotz. Adaptive security and privacy for mHealth sensing. InUSENIX Workshop on Health Security (HealthSec), August, 2011. Short paper. (Abstract) (BibTeX) [PDF] Copyright © 2011 by the authors.
• Aarathi Prasad and Jacob Sorber and Timothy Stablein and Denise Anthony and David Kotz. Exposing privacy concerns in mHealth. In USENIX Workshop on Health Security (HealthSec), August, 2011. Position paper. (Abstract) (BibTeX) [PDF] Copyright © 2011 by the authors.
• Jacob Sorber and Minho Shin and Ron Peterson and David Kotz. Poster: Practical Trusted Computing for mHealth Sensing. In International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), June, 2011. ACM Press. DOI 10.1145/1999995.2000058. (Abstract) (BibTeX) [PDF] Copyright © 2011 by ACM.
• Cory Cornelius and David Kotz. Recognizing whether sensors are on the same body. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Pervasive Computing, pages 332-349, June, 2011. Springer-Verlag. DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-21726-5_21. (Abstract) (BibTeX) [PDF] Copyright © 2011 by Springer-Verlag.
• David Kotz. A threat taxonomy for mHealth privacy. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Networked Healthcare Technology (NetHealth), January, 2011. IEEE Computer Society Press. DOI 10.1109/COMSNETS.2011.5716518. (Abstract) (BibTeX) [PDF] Copyright © 2011 by IEEE.
• Shrirang Mare and David Kotz, "Is Bluetooth the right technology for mHealth?", In USENIX Workshop on Health Security (HealthSec), August, 2010. Position paper
• Cory Cornelius and David Kotz, "On Usable Authentication for Wireless Body Area Networks", In USENIX Workshop on Health Security (HealthSec), August, 2010. Position paper
• Aarathi Prasad and David Kotz, "Can I access your Data? Privacy Management in mHealth.", In USENIX Workshop on Health Security (HealthSec), August, 2010. Position paper
• David Kotz, Sasikanth Avancha and Amit Baxi, "A Privacy Framework for Mobile Health and Home-Care Systems", Proceedings of the Security and Privacy in Medical and Home-Care Systems Workshop (SPIMACS), Chicago, IL, November 13, 2009.
• Janani Sriram, Minho Shin, Tanzeem Choudhury and David Kotz, "Activity-aware ECG-based patient authentication for remote health monitoring", Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and Workshop on Machine Learning for Multi-modal Interaction (ICMI-MLMI), Cambridge, MA, November 2-4, 2009.

News

• Cybersecurity, Health Care, and Mobile Devices, Dartmouth Now, September 20, 2011.
• Poor Cybersecurity in Health Devices a Life-threatening Problem, The Epoch Times, August 15, 2011.
• Tanzeem Choudhury develops cellphone apps to track our health, EarthSky, March 23, 2011.
  • Tanzeem Choudhury is interviewed about mHealth research she is conducting with Professor Andrew Campbell (Computer Science) and Dr. Ethan Berke (Dartmouth Medical School).

Team

The TISH mHealth team is led by Principal Investigator Professor David Kotz (Computer Science).  The team also includes Senior Programmer Ron Peterson, PhD student Aarathi Prasad, PhD student Cory Cornelius, MS student Rima Murthy, undergraduate students Emma Smithayer '12 and Zach Marois '12. ISTS Postdoctoral Fellow Jacob Sorber and PhD student Shrirang Mare conduct related mHealth research on the Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects on Security (SHARPS) effort.  Tanzeem Choudhury (now Associate Professor in the Information Science Department at Cornell University) co-led this research thread for the first two years of the project.