m-Health as a positive urban data privacy case
Published on 24.05.2023
Written by Kalle Toiskallio
As noted many times, health as a theme of itself is not part of FinEst Twins project’s and FinEst Centre’s original research portfolio. However, in the FinEst Centre there is already a pilot dealing with well-being and urban planning. So, the topic of health seems to be growing gradually, when being linked with the original research themes, this time with Urban Analytics & Data, echoing also interests of Smart City Governance theme.
Simply as an issue of data collection for research purposes, this paper sees some light in the tunnel. However, since after the European GDPR launch, we as researchers and specialists are all very cautious with privacy issues in data collection. Thus, different levels of understandings of society-moral issues dealing with individual personal data vs. huge amounts of collected health data are crucial topics, when talking of digitalisation of services related to resources of health-care system in smart cities. A very small detail is the wording. “Mobile” here does not refer to mobility in the sense of, say, health in motion, health of mobile people but simply to a health app that is used in the mobile phone.
Authors from Aalto and Taltech, Sara Klossner, Hadi Ghanbari, Matti Rossi and Lill Sarv write:
The rapid growth of the population and the increase in life expectancy put intense pressure on the healthcare systems worldwide. Mobile health applications (m-health apps) can help ease the situation by offering highly personalized services that empower individuals to take better care of their health. To reach their full potential, m-health apps must continuously gather personal health data from users, which leads to privacy concerns. We study the influence of users’ privacy concerns on their intention to disclose personal health data to m-health apps. Using an online survey and conducting SEM-PLS, we show that a personalization-privacy paradox is present in the context of m-health apps. While respondents claim to have privacy concerns about using m-health apps, their concerns do not negatively affect their self-disclosure intentions nor their intention to continue using the apps. Our results show that the magnitude of personalization-privacy paradox is influenced by demographic factors.
Keywords: Mobile health, Privacy, Artificial Intelligence, Femtech, Healthcare.
See the full-paper here
