With the advent of rapid development of wearable technology and mobile computing, huge amount of personal health-related data is being generated and accumulated on continuous basis at every moment. These personal datasets contain valuable information and they belong to and asset of the individual users, hence should be owned and controlled by themselves. Currently most of such datasets are stored and controlled by different service providers and this centralised data storage brings challenges of data security and hinders the data sharing. These personal health data are valuable resources for healthcare research and commercial projects. In this research work, we propose a conceptual design for sharing personal continuousdynamic health data using blockchain technology supplemented by cloud storage to share the health-related information in a secure and transparent manner. Besides, we also introduce a data quality inspection module based on machine learning techniques to have control over data quality. The primary goal of the proposed system is to enable users to own, control and share their personal health data securely, in a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant way to get benefit from their personal datasets. It also provides an efficient way for researchers and commercial data consumers to collect high quality personal health data for research and commercial purposes.
Background Huge amounts of health-related data are generated every moment with the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable technologies. These big health data contain great value and can bring benefit to all stakeholders in the health care ecosystem. Currently, most of these data are siloed and fragmented in different health care systems or public and private databases. It prevents the fulfillment of intelligent health care inspired by these big data. Security and privacy concerns and the lack of ensured authenticity trails of data bring even more obstacles to health data sharing. With a decentralized and consensus-driven nature, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) provide reliable solutions such as blockchain, Ethereum, and IOTA Tangle to facilitate the health care data sharing. Objective This study aimed to develop a health-related data sharing system by integrating IoT and DLT to enable secure, fee-less, tamper-resistant, highly-scalable, and granularly-controllable health data exchange, as well as build a prototype and conduct experiments to verify the feasibility of the proposed solution. Methods The health-related data are generated by 2 types of IoT devices: wearable devices and stationary air quality sensors. The data sharing mechanism is enabled by IOTA’s distributed ledger, the Tangle, which is a directed acyclic graph. Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) is adopted to facilitate data communications among different parties. Merkle Hash Tree is used for data encryption and verification. Results A prototype system was built according to the proposed solution. It uses a smartwatch and multiple air sensors as the sensing layer; a smartphone and a single-board computer (Raspberry Pi) as the gateway; and a local server for data publishing. The prototype was applied to the remote diagnosis of tremor disease. The results proved that the solution could enable costless data integrity and flexible access management during data sharing. Conclusions DLT integrated with IoT technologies could greatly improve the health-related data sharing. The proposed solution based on IOTA Tangle and MAM could overcome many challenges faced by other traditional blockchain-based solutions in terms of cost, efficiency, scalability, and flexibility in data access management. This study also showed the possibility of fully decentralized health data sharing by replacing the local server with edge computing devices.
We present Dynamic Condition Response Graphs (DCR Graphs) as a declarative, event-based process model inspired by the workflow language employed by our industrial partner and conservatively generalizing prime event structures. A dynamic condition response graph is a directed graph with nodes representing the events that can happen and arrows representing four relations between events: condition, response, include, and exclude. Distributed DCR Graphs is then obtained by assigning roles to events and principals. We give a graphical notation inspired by related work by van der Aalst et al. We exemplify the use of distributed DCR Graphs on a simple workflow taken from a field study at a Danish hospital, pointing out their flexibility compared to imperative workflow models. Finally we provide a mapping from DCR Graphs to Büchi-automata.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency whose transactions are recorded on a distributed, openly accessible ledger. On the Bitcoin Blockchain, an entity's real-world identity is hidden behind a pseudonym, a so-called address. Therefore, Bitcoin is widely assumed to provide a high degree of anonymity, which is a driver for its frequent use for illicit activities. This paper presents a novel approach for reducing the anonymity of the Bitcoin Blockchain by using Supervised Machine Learning to predict the type of yet-unidentified entities. We utilised a sample of 434 entities (with ≈ 200 million transactions), whose identity and type had been revealed, as training set data and built classifiers differentiating among 10 categories. Our main finding is that we can indeed predict the type of a yet-unidentified entity. Using the Gradient Boosting algorithm, we achieve an accuracy of 77% and F1-score of ≈ 0.75. We discuss our novel approach of Supervised Machine Learning for uncovering Bitcoin Blockchain anonymity and its potential applications to forensics and financial compliance and its societal implications, outline study limitations and propose future research directions.
Current analytical approaches in computational social science can be characterized by four dominant paradigms: text analysis (information extraction and classification), social network analysis (graph theory), social complexity analysis (complex systems science), and social simulations (cellular automata and agent-based modeling). However, when it comes to organizational and societal units of analysis, there exists no approach to conceptualize, model, analyze, explain, and predict social media interactions as individuals' associations with ideas, values, identities, and so on. To address this limitation, based on the sociology of associations and the mathematics of set theory, this paper presents a new approach to big data analytics called social set analysis. Social set analysis consists of a generative framework for the philosophies of computational social science, theory of social data, conceptual and formal models of social data, and an analytical framework for combining big social data sets with organizational and societal data sets. Three empirical studies of big social data are presented to illustrate and demonstrate social set analysis in terms of fuzzy set-theoretical sentiment analysis, crisp set-theoretical interaction analysis, and eventstudies-oriented set-theoretical visualizations. Implications for big data analytics, current limitations of the set-theoretical approach, and future directions are outlined.INDEX TERMS Big social data, formal models, social set analysis, big data visual analytics, new computational models for big social data.
Recent scandals on the abuse of personal information from social media platforms and numerous user identity data breaches raise concerns about technical, commercial, and ethical aspects of privacy and security of user data. European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the largest changes in data privacy regulation and entails several key regulatory measures for both data controllers and data processors to empower and protect EU citizens' privacy. In this research work, we propose a conceptual design and high-level architecture for a Blockchain-based Personal Data and Identity Management System (BPDIMS), a human-centric and GDPR-compliant personal data and identity management system based on the blockchain technology. We describe how BPDIMS's architecture utilizes blockchain technology to provide a high-level of security, trust and transparency. We discuss how BPDIM's human-centric approach with GDPR compliance shifts the control over personal data to the end users and empowers them better.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.