People-centric sensing in assistive healthcare: Privacy challenges and directions

As the domains of pervasive computing and sensor networking are expanding, there is an ongoing trend towards assistive living and healthcare support environments that can effectively assimilate these technologies according to human needs. Most of the existing research in assistive healthcare follows a more passive approach and has focused on collecting and processing data using a static-topology and an application-aware infrastructure. However, with the technological advances in sensing, computation, storage, and communications, a new era is about to emerge changing the traditional view of sensor-based assistive environments where people are passive data consumers, with one where people carry mobile sensing elements involving large volumes of data related to everyday human activities. This evolution will be driven by people-centric sensing and will turn mobile phones into global mobile sensing devices enabling thousands new personal, social, and public sensing applications. In this paper, we discuss our vision for people-centric sensing in assistive healthcare environments and study the security challenges it brings. This highly dynamic and mobile setting presents new challenges for information security, data privacy and ethics, caused by the ubiquitous nature of data traces originating from sensors carried by people. We aim to instigate discussion on these critical issues because people-centric sensing will never succeed without adequate provisions on security and privacy. To that end, we discuss the latest advances in security and privacy protection strategies that hold promise in this new exciting paradigm. We hope this work will better highlight the need for privacy in people-centric sensing applications and spawn further research in this area. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.