Although current healthcare systems actively collect medical data from patients in hospitals, numerous personal subjective data is commonly neglected in the analysis of environmental public health due to high-sensitivity of health-related data. As a result, there is a lack of real-time monitoring data, such as symptom reports from high-risk groups and severe environmental pollution, causing notoriously long latency for effective prevention of the spread of epidemic diseases. This project is to address the fundamental challenges on collecting and analyzing multi-scale data from multi-sources for environmental public health in a privacy-preserving manner. The developed technologies empower each individual in a community to proactively contribute real-time data of themselves and surroundings for the betterment of public health without compromising his/her privacy. In addition, this project also serves as a training ground for educating future decision-makers and workforce on privacy-preserving healthcare technologies.
This multidisciplinary research advances the state-of-the-art public health by combining multi-scale data collection and analysis. Specifically, the project redesigns current healthcare monitoring systems for both severe infectious diseases and long-term environment-related diseases and their exacerbation (e.g., air pollutant-induced pulmonary diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer). By considering the high sensitivity and distributed manner of the data from patients and users, this project addresses the privacy preservation in two-fold: 1) completely redesign efficient collaborative classification schemes by applying novel metrics without leaking individual's privacy; and 2) introduce new architectures to perform crowdsourcing data analysis by using light-weighted and verifiable encryption schemes. This project also grounds the theoretical outcomes to actual crowdsensing systems and social networks for validation. Finally, a new methodology on public health prediction model is developed with practical systematic implementation in healthcare systems.
