This Dartmouth-led project, named Trustworthy Health and Wellness (THaW), involves an interdisciplinary research team with expertise in computer science, business, behavioral health, health policy, and healthcare information technology who will collaborate on an array of research projects to create health and wellness systems that can be trusted by individuals to protect their privacy and can be trusted by health professionals to ensure data integrity and security. This project is directed by David Kotz, PhD (Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth and CTBH Affiliate). CTBH Director, Lisa A. Marsch, PhD, serves as Co-Principal Investigator at the Dartmouth site. Partner sites include Johns Hopkins University, University of Michigan, and University of Urbana-Champaign.

This project tackles many of the fundamental research challenges necessary to provide trustworthy information systems for health and wellness, as sensitive information and health-related tasks are increasingly pushed into mobile devices and cloud-based services. The project will include an array of research activities. These include developing methods to authenticate clinical staff to tablet computers in a continuous and unobtrusive way, and to provide patients a usable way to control the information that mobile sensors collect about them. Other project activities focus on managing security of healthcare devices in the home and in remote clinics, without adding burden on the homeowner or clinical staff. Towards this end, the investigators are developing methods to verify medical directives issued to remote devices. Another approach being investigated is segmenting access to medical records from mobile devices to limit information exposure, and developing methods to audit behavior of this complex ecosystem of devices and systems. The investigators will also design tools to handle genomic data in the cloud while enabling patient control over information and to detect malware in medical devices.

CTBH will offer operational and clinical research expertise and facilitate access to clinical populations and settings for testing and evaluation of these research activities.

Collectively, the goal of these activities is to enable the promise of health and wellness technology by innovating mobile- and cloud-computing systems that respect the privacy of individuals and the trustworthiness of medical information.

More information about this project and the project team is available at the project website: http://thaw.org