Understanding sharing preferences and behavior for mHealth devices

Abstract

If people are not in control of the collection and sharing of their personal health information collected using mobile health (mHealth) devices and applications, privacy concerns could limit their willingness to use and reduce potential benefits provided via mHealth. We investigated users' willingness to share their personal information, collected using mHealth sensing devices, with their family, friends, third parties, and the public. Previous work employed hypothetical scenarios, surveys and interviews to understand people's information-sharing behavior; to the best of our knowledge, ours is the first privacy study where participants actually have the option to share their own information with real people. We expect our results can guide the development of privacy controls for mobile devices and applications that collect any personal and activity information, not restricted to health or fitness information.Our study revealed three interesting findings about people's privacy concerns regarding their sensed health information: 1) We found that people share certain health information less with friends and family than with strangers, but more with specific third parties than the public. 2) Information that people were less willing to share could be information that is indirectly collected by the mobile devices. 3) We confirmed that privacy concerns are not static; mHealth device users may change their sharing decisions over time. Based on our findings, we emphasize the need for sensible default settings and flexible privacy controls to allow people to choose different settings for different recipients, and to change their sharing settings at any time.

Privacy Considerations when Designing Social Network Systems to Support Successful Ageing

“…Our participants sought to protect their family and friends through the hiding of negative moods and health problems, which supports the work of Prasad et al, [43]. While they may hide health information from some individuals, they are open to others who might help them manage better.…”

Wellbeing as a proxy for a mHealth study

“…Similar to our experiment, the study by Prasad et al [25] investigates information sharing behaviour in mHealth, when users have options to share with friends, family, third parties and the public. However, we are interested in investigating the sharing behaviour in a purpose-driven mHealth scenario, i.e.…”

“…So far, most investigations in this research area are based on surveys and user interviews. To the best of our knowledge, an experiment by Prasad et al [25] is the first study that collects data and investigates privacy concern related to data sharing with real user interactions. Such studies are resource intensive, difficult to execute and reproduce, and can take a considerable amount of time.…”

Remote Health Monitoring Using Online Social Media

“…the location of their health information and which parties and/or organisations have access to it. Furthermore, a study by Prasad et al [66], also from 2012, proposes that a highly granular control is required in sharing of health information. This means detailed and perhaps subtle application of access control rules to health data, i.e.…”

“…According to [60] and [66], the studies by Adams et al [73], Caine et al [74], and Lim et al [75] have suggested that patients should have full control of who can access their data. However, most of the studies in this area are applied to EHR / PHR, to allow patients to maintain and manage their own medical records and share them under a patient's control.…”