A smart health application and its related privacy issues

Together with the development of technologies such as those for ubiquitous computing, data mining, Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the concepts of smart cities and mobile health (m-Health) have emerged. Along the same line, the smart health concept (s-Health), understood as a context-aware healthcare paradigm for smart environments, improves the quality of healthcare systems within smart cities. However, s-Health may encounter some privacy and security issues. For example, in order to obtain the current location and health conditions of citizens, these citizens might be continuously monitored, which could be seen as a privacy invasion. In this paper, we describe an application within the s-Health paradigm. In particular, our approach allows to effectively deal with citizens who have respiratory conditions. Our application example suggests low-pollution routes to citizens in order to lessen their respiratory-related problems, and proactively activates water sprays in fountains to reduce the effect of pollution or pollen. Besides the description of the application, the main contribution of the article is the analysis of the emerging privacy issues of the proposed application and the discussion of possible countermeasures.