This NSF-funded project tackled many of the fundamental research challenges necessary to provide trustworthy information systems for health and wellness, in a time when sensitive information and health-related tasks were increasingly pushed into mobile devices and cloud-based services. The interdisciplinary research team included expertise from computer science, business, behavioral health, health policy, and healthcare information technology. It enabled the creation of health & wellness systems that could be trusted by individual citizens to protect their privacy and by health professionals to ensure data integrity and security. Although this work was motivated by a nationally important application domain (health and wellness), the solutions had applications far beyond that.

This project developed methods to authenticate clinical staff to tablet computers in a continuous and unobtrusive way, and provided patients a usable way to control the information that mobile sensors collected about them. One of the goals was to manage the security of healthcare devices in home and remote clinic settings, without adding burden on the homeowner or clinical staff; towards this end the investigators developed methods to verify medical directives issued to remote devices. One of the approaches included segmenting access to medical records from mobile devices to limit information exposure; the team developed methods to audit the behavior of this complex ecosystem of devices and systems. The investigators designed tools to handle genomic data in the cloud while enabling patient control over information, to detect malware in medical devices through power analysis, and to provide contextual information to those who use health data collected in the field.

Thank you for following our blog and keeping up with new developments. This project has ended.

Mission: To enable the promise of health and wellness technology by innovating mobile- and cloud-computing systems that respect the privacy of individuals and the trustworthiness of medical information.