Privacy-preserving genome-aware remote health monitoring

Using genetic profiles of individuals for tailored diagnosis and treatment has great promise in the healthcare industry. Despite of the rapid growth in genome-aware medicine, genome-aware health monitoring has not been studied as well. A major stumbling block is the privacy issues of such applications. In addition to privacy concerns in a traditional health monitoring system, i.e., the privacy of users' biomedical sensing data and the protection of the proprietary health monitoring program, severe privacy concerns arise when users' genomic data are integrated into the health monitoring program due to the re-identification and phenotype attacks based on the DNA profile and the relevance of DNA information in a family. In this paper, we investigate these privacy risks and propose a privacy- preserving approach for genome-aware health monitoring. In our approach, users can only learn the diagnostic results based on their genomic and biomedical sensing data, while the the healthcare service provider learns nothing. Security analysis and performance evaluations are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.