A Framework for Capturing Patient Consent in Pervasive Healthcare Applications

In this chapter, the authors describe a new framework for pervasive healthcare applications where the patient’s consent has a pivotal role. In their framework, patients are able to control the disclosure of their medical data. The patient’s consent is implicitly captured by the context in which his or her medical data is being accessed. Context is expressed in terms of workflows. The execution of a task in a workflow carries information that the system uses for providing access rights accordingly to the patient’s consent. Ultimately, the patient is in charge of withdrawing consent if necessary. Moreover, the use of workflow enables the enforcement of the need-to-kwon principle. This means that a subject is authorised to access sensitive data only when required by the actual situation. INtrODUctION Healthcare Applications are characterised by the integration of software systems in healthcare environments. Healthcare applications seamlessly assist patients and carers in performing their tasks and provide them ubiquitous access to required information. As such, healthcare application can be considered as pervasive computing systems (Weiser, 1991). Real-world medical environments present several research challenges that need to be addressed for developing robust healthcare applications. As a showcase for our approach, in this chapter we focus on technology-assisted living, where the domains to be administered are units of personal living. Here, someone may be living alone, perhaps in sheltered housing, perhaps post-operative, perhaps with one or more disabilities, perhaps elderly and infirm. In this scenario, the healthcare applications are comDOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-332-6.ch012