METHODS article
Front. Digit. Health
Sec. Health Informatics
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2025.1604001
This article is part of the Research TopicPrivacy Enhancing Technology: a Top 10 Emerging Technology to Revolutionize HealthcareView all 5 articles
Challenges of identification and anonymity in time continuous data from medical environments
Provisionally accepted
- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
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In the context of medical environments, timecontinuous data, such as electrocardiographic (ECG) records, necessitates a distinct approach to anonymization due to the paramount importance of preserving the spatio-temporal relation for optimal utility. A wide array of data types, characterized by their high sensitivity to the patient's well-being and their substantial interest to researchers, are generated. A significant proportion of this data may be of interest to researchers beyond the original purposes for which it was collected by the patient. This necessity underscores the pressing need for effective anonymization methods, a challenge that existing approaches currently fail to adequately address. This privacy mechanism is imperative for ensuring the respect of patient rights and informed consent in the context of the European Health Data Space. This paper assesses the challenges and opportunities inherent in developing a novel approach to anonymize such data and to devise suitable metrics for assessing the efficacy of anonymization. One promising approach is to adapt Differential Privacy, such that the mechanism can account for temporal context and correlations, making it suitable for timecontinuous data.
Keywords: Privacy, Medical data, Differential privacy (DP), anonymity, data sharing & re-use
Received: 01 Apr 2025; Accepted: 10 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hammer and Strufe. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Freimut Hammer, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
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