The research project “WearPrivate” started in September 2021 and will run for three years. It is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). In addition to the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE in Kaiserslautern, Saarland University and the companies ambiotex from Schönefeld and WearHealth from Bremen are also involved in the project.
The partners are developing coordinated solutions for end-to-end security along the entire data processing chain when wearables are used. Body sensor technology from wearable specialist ambiotex is being used for practical testing, including smart shirts with embedded sensors for precise vital data measurement. Together with WearHealth, a specialist in the biomedical analysis of wearable data for the purpose of health prevention and risk minimization, customized data analysis methods are being developed and evaluated in practical tests.
The Chair of Legal Informatics at Saarland University is supporting the technical implementation of the demonstrators. It advises the developers on ethical and legal issues and designs solutions for a data protection-friendly design of vital data evaluation. Evaluations that go beyond the agreed purposes must be reliably prevented by technical security measures.
Challenges
- In the future, our everyday lives will be increasingly permeated by the “Internet of Things”, i.e., a multitude of networked, often barely perceptible components that continuously record and evaluate a wealth of environmental data
- The “Internet of Things” increasingly also extends to our privacy
- Lack of clear concepts on how to counter the data protection implications of such systems
Contributions of Fraunhofer IESE
- Development of an individual privacy cockpit that gives company employees all the information they need about the possible usage and protection of their data. This enables employees to make an informed decision about which data they wish to share and for what purposes.
- Investigation of how such cockpits can be designed in a user-friendly way and how the privacy restrictions selected in the cockpit can be implemented technically
Goals / Results
- Basic work regarding the data protection-compliant, user-friendly design of such systems
- Research into technical issues in connection with the secure and confidential collection, evaluation, and interpretation of wearable data for the purpose of health protection
- Consideration of the ethical and data protection aspects of the usage of such vital data
- Development of concepts on how employees can exercise their right to informational self-determination and how the data obtained can be processed and used as sparingly as possible – without undermining the health benefits of data collection