A Cloud-based Mobile Healthcare Monitoring Framework with Location Privacy Preservation

Nowadays, ubiquitous healthcare monitoring applications are becoming a necessity. In a pervasive smart healthcare system, the user's location information is always transmitted periodically to healthcare providers to increase the quality of the service provided to the user. However, revealing the user's location will affect the user's privacy. This paper presents a novel cloud-based secure location privacy-preserving mobile healthcare framework with decision-making capabilities. A user's vital signs are sensed possibly through a wearable healthcare device and transmitted to a cloud server for securely storing user's data, processing, and decision making. The proposed framework integrates a number of features such as machine learning (ML) for classifying a user's health state, and crowdsensing for collecting information about a person's privacy preferences for possible locations and applying such information to a user who did not set his privacy preferences. In addition to location privacy preservation methods (LPPM) such as obfuscation, perturbation and encryption to protect the location of the user and provide a secure monitoring framework. The proposed framework detects clear emergency cases and quickly decides about sending a help message to a healthcare provider before sending data to the cloud server. To validate the efficiency of the proposed framework, a prototype is developed and tested. The obtained results from the proposed prototype prove its feasibility and utility. Compared to the state of art, the proposed framework offers an adaptive context-based decision for location sharing privacy and controlling the trade-off between location privacy and service utility.