A Systematic Literature Review on Wearable Health Data Publishing under Differential Privacy

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews how differential privacy techniques are applied to protect individuals' wearable health data, highlighting current methods, limitations, and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of existing differential privacy approaches in wearable health data publishing, identifying gaps and proposing future research directions.

Findings

Differential privacy is increasingly used for wearable health data.

Current solutions have limitations in utility and privacy balance.

Future research should address scalability and real-world deployment challenges.

Abstract

Wearable devices generate different types of physiological data about the individuals. These data can provide valuable insights for medical researchers and clinicians that cannot be availed through traditional measures. Researchers have historically relied on survey responses or observed behavior. Interestingly, physiological data can provide a richer amount of user cognition than that obtained from any other sources, including the user himself. Therefore, the inexpensive consumer-grade wearable devices have become a point of interest for the health researchers. In addition, they are also used in continuous remote health monitoring and sometimes by the insurance companies. However, the biggest concern for such kind of use cases is the privacy of the individuals. There are a few privacy mechanisms, such as abstraction and k-anonymity, are widely used in information systems. Recently, Differential Privacy (DP) has emerged as a proficient technique to publish privacy sensitive data, including data from wearable devices. In this paper, we have conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to identify, select and critically appraise researches in DP as well as to understand different techniques and exiting use of DP in wearable data publishing. Based on our study we have identified the limitations of proposed solutions and provided future directions.