Abstract
Research suggests that the interactions between a patient and a health professional through an mHealth app (a mobile health application), can improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare. However, the risk of disclosure of personal or health related data can be higher when using such devices, as there is a lack of specific security standards or guidelines for their deployment. Also, there are commonly no controls to comprehensively verify and minimize security and privacy vulnerabilities that may exist in those apps before they are released in the “wild”. To make matters worse, the medical record has a significantly higher financial value (on the black market) compared with other personal records (e.g., credit card or bank account details), which obviously increases the motivation for unauthorised accesses and misuse. In order to mitigate these problems, socio-technical security as well as privacy and legal aspects need to be taken into account when developing mHealth apps. In this work, essential recommendations regarding the previously itemized are provided as a means to guide both developers and users alike, into more secure, private and usable mHealth apps.
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Acknowledgments
TagUBig - Taming Your Big Data (IF/00693/2015) from Researcher FCT Program funded by National Funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia; COMPETE2020, and NORTE-01-0247-FEDER-033275 (AIRDOC, project NORTE-01-0247-FEDER-033275, financed by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). AIRDOC is with ITEA 3 16040 PHE - Personal Health Empowerment project consortium).
Rute Almeida is supported by ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) through the operation POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029130 (mINSPIRERS — mHealth to measure and improve adherence to medication in chronic obstructive respiratory diseases - generalisation and evaluation of gamification, peer support and advanced image processing technologies) funded by COMPETE2020 and by National Funds through FCT.
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Ferreira, A., Almeida, R., Muchagata, J. (2020). How Secure Is Your Mobile Health?. In: Henriques, J., Neves, N., de Carvalho, P. (eds) XV Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing – MEDICON 2019. MEDICON 2019. IFMBE Proceedings, vol 76. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31635-8_168
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