Healthcare is a societal need with health spending accounting for 17.7% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) today. There are new challenges such as new and evolving diseases (e.g., antibiotic resistant bacteria), evolving situations (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic), evolving behavior (e.g., anti-vaxxer movement, sedentary lifestyle, opioid crises) that require constant innovation in therapeutic treatments, drug discovery, and other aspects. Advances in information and sensing technologies, communication platforms, and robotics assisted systems, have led to significant improvements in the quality of healthcare delivery and in controlling the costs of healthcare. Within the Health and Human Services sector, there is rapid adoption of new technologies such as IoT devices, robotics assisted systems, mobile and Edge/Cloud computing, Social Networks, AI/ML, etc., creating a data-intensive hyper-connected cyber-physical interacting systems. These new technologies provide increasing opportunities to realize the dream of personalized health and well-being. However, all of these technologies bring a plethora of their own unique security, privacy and ethical challenges.
The objective of this workshop is to bring together approximately 50-60 scientists, students, and stakeholders to identify the unique challenges in terms of security, privacy, fairness, and ethics underlying the use of information technology and computing in healthcare. By bringing together participants from computing, informatics, and healthcare, across academia, industry, and government the workshop aims to enable cross-fertilization between these communities, and the identification of the major challenges that are unique to this context. The insights and findings that results will be summarized in a workshop report and disseminated to the attendees and scientific experts in the fields of security, privacy, healthcare, and informatics.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
