This NSF-funded project tackles many of the fundamental research challenges necessary to provide trustworthy information systems for health and wellness, as sensitive information and health-related tasks are increasingly pushed into mobile devices and cloud-based services. The interdisciplinary research team includes expertise from computer science, business, behavioral health, health policy, and healthcare information technology to enable the creation of health & wellness systems that can be trusted by individual citizens to protect their privacy and can be trusted by health professionals to ensure data integrity and security. Although these problems are motivated by a nationally important application domain (health and wellness), the solutions have applications far beyond that domain.

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

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.

Information Source: https://thaw.org/about/