Multi-Party Privacy Policy Management in the Context of Health Monitoring: An Exploratory Study.

There is an increasing number of assisted living technologies and health monitoring systems to provide electronic health services and help patients and the elderly stay at home longer. It ensures users’ safety and reduces caregivers’ workload. Regardless of the benefits that health monitoring systems have brought to users, they are in the face of privacy challenges, which can influence users’ adoption of these technologies. One of the challenges is multi-party privacy policy management. As different parties may have different considerations in the same scenario, they can make different privacy decisions. Therefore, a privacy policy management scheme is required to deal with conflicts. In this paper, we present the work of a user study with the scope of collecting several participants’ opinions on multi-party privacy policy management in the context of health monitoring. One focus group and eight semi-structured interviews were conducted. Our questions for participants adopt strategies from online social networks. After that, we discuss participants’ views on privacy decision conflict resolution in different health conditions and whether a recommendation system is needed to help with multi-party privacy policy management. We try to make prioritization based on participants’ views and the emergency level of events in different scenarios, increase technology adoption, and ensure health services are better delivered. The results reflect the importance of adopting flexible strategies like majority weighted voting in different health conditions, which serves as a basis for multi-party privacy policy scheme development.