Towards a Biometric Authentication-Based Hybrid Trust-Computing Approach for Verification of Provider Profiles in Online Healthcare Information

With the advent of the Internet and the growth in the use of cyberspace by consumers for online healthcare information (OHI), various researchers from different disciplines have been working on the challenges and threats posed by the issue of cyberchondria, which is related to the cyber psychological aspects of uncertainty, anxiety, quality, and credibility. However, there are few research efforts, which have directly treated the case of cyberchondria as an interdisciplinary trust-computing problem in information assurance. None of these efforts has encountered the reliability issues with OHI, leading to cyberchondria, by handling provider level trust antecedents. OHI based trust research has also never used biometrics to validate multi-dimensional trust constructs, including visual appearance, reputation, familiarity and social identity. Additionally, this research avenue has not handled the trustworthiness of OHI at the provider level through verification of institutional profiles and affiliations. Hence, in order to enhance trustworthiness through verification at the trustee level, this paper conceptualizes and proposes a novel trust-computing model, which is driven by visual recognition based biometric authentication of physician profiles. The uniqueness of this hybrid trust model lies in its biometric-inspired basis and provider-centric approach, along with its fine blend of soft trust and hard trust elements. As an initial proof-of-concept prototype for the proposed approach, an experiment is conducted to demonstrate a potential implementation of this trust-computing model. The experimental results obtained through this prototype implementation are shared as part of this paper. This prototype will drive further innovative experiments with the proposed trust-computing model, and shall form the basis of future trust related research in OHI for addressing cyberchondria.