Relevant academic degrees: PhD in Computer Science (National University of Ireland, Cork, 2010), MSc in Computer Science (Transilvania University of Brasov, 2006), BSc in Computer Science (Transilvania University of Brasov, 2005), BSc in Sociology (Transilvania University of Brasov, 2007).

A Secure Distributed e-Health System for the Management of Personal Health Metrics Data

The definition of smart city as a broad concept values the versatile acquisition, storage, and processing of relevant data for the city’s community. In this context, health data occupies a privileged place. The reliable gathering of personal health information has become recently possible through wearable medical devices. These devices usually do not store the data locally and offer, in the most favourable case, limited basic data processing features, and virtually no advanced processing capabilities for the collected personal health data.

This paper describes an integrated distributed e-Health system, which collects health data from the enrolled city residents, and allows secure storage and processing of medical data in cloud by using a comprehensive encryption model to preserve the data privacy, which is based on the NTRU public-key cryptosystem. The system collects the user data through a client application module that is installed on the user’s smartphone or smartwatch, and securely transports it to the cloud backend. The homomorphic processing of the encrypted data is performed using the Apache Spark service. The event-based handlers are triggered by the IBM OpenWhisk programming service. The prototype has been tested using a real-world use case, which involves five hundred residents of Brasov City, Romania.