A hierarchical privacy-preserving IoT architecture for vision-based hand rehabilitation assessment

Abstract

The healthcare industry requires the integration of digital technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), to their full potential, particularly during this challenging time and the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in the disruptions in healthcare delivery, service operations, and shortage of healthcare personnel. However, every opportunity has barriers and bumps, and when it comes to IoT healthcare, data privacy is one of the main growing issues. Despite the recent advances in the development of IoT healthcare architectures, most of them are invasive for the data subjects. In this context, the broad applications of AI in the IoT domain have also been hindered by emerging strict legal and ethical requirements to protect individual privacy. Camera-based solutions that monitor human subjects in everyday settings, e.g., for Online Range of Motion (ROM) detection, are making this problem even worse. One actively practiced branch of such solutions is telerehabilitation, which provides remote solutions for the physically impaired to regain their strength and get back to their normal daily routines. The process usually involves transmitting video/images from the patient performing rehabilitation exercises and applying Machine Learning (ML) techniques to extract meaningful information to help therapists devise further treatment plans. Thereby, real-time measurement and assessment of rehabilitation exercises in a reliable, accurate, and Privacy-Preserving manner is imperative. To address the privacy issue of existing solutions, this paper proposes a holistic Privacy-Preserving (PP) hierarchical IoT solution that simultaneously addresses the utilization of AI-driven IoT and the demands for data protection. Furthermore, the efficiency of the proposed architecture is demonstrated by a novel machine learning-based system that allows immediate assessment and extraction of ROM as the critical information for analyzing the progress of patients.

Fusion of IoT, AI, Edge–Fog–Cloud, and Blockchain: Challenges, Solutions, and a Case Study in Healthcare and Medicine

“…HE is specialized encryption that allows a variety of computations to be executed on non-plaintext (encrypted) data; therefore, results are also encrypted. When decrypted, the outputs match plaintext operational results [23], [98], [99], [100], [101], [102].…”

“…When the local computation outcomes are combined, a whole, accurate output is shared with all participants. Secret sharing generally takes the form of Additive Secret Sharing or Shamir Secret Sharing [106], [98].…”

“…Generally, DP systems are categorized into local privacy, and global privacy [107]. Globally systems include a trusted entity known as the curator that can access raw, private data from many different participants [98]. The curator analyzes the data and injects noise into the output.…”

“…In other words, every participant acts as a curator of their own database. Local DP systems could also include an untrusted aggregator to collect data from everyone at once [98]. For example, a political researcher could ask all residents of a town if they have ever joined the Trump's party.…”

Clinical guidelines on the application of Internet of Things (IOT) medical technology in the rehabilitation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

“…"Cloud" is a virtual computer resource that can be selfmaintained and managed, usually some large server clusters, including computer servers, storage servers, broadband resources and so on (14). The powerful computing and storage capacity of cloud computing can provide strong hardware and software and technical support for the storage and processing of massive data in IOT, which can effectively meet the elastic demand of patient monitoring data processing and analysis of huge computing volume (15). The large amount of monitoring data accumulated can be data mined, which fully reflects the advantages of cloud computing.…”