TILT

Current major research projects

Trusted Health Care Services (THeCS)
Electronic healthcare services offer great benefits to patients and people in need. Patients that use these services gain peace of mind, independence and a better quality of life. Patients rely on these services for their safety and care. For physicians, electronic health and wellness services offers an opportunity for better and continuous care. For insurers and governments, these services bring a reduction of costs, and for commercial service providers, this is a new business opportunity.

Trusted Healthcare Services (THeCS) addresses a key issue for electronic healthcare services,i.e., trust. Healthcare providers need to trust the patient data they obtain remotely from the measurement devices deployed in patient’s home. It is crucial for them to know that a vital sign of a registered user is measured (not of his friends/children), that the measurement was taken with a certified device, under standardized conditions (e.g., with the blood pressure cuff on the arm at the heart level) and that it is not obtained as a result of device malfunctioning. Patients need to trust the service in general, as well as that the service will properly protect personal data. Standard internet security techniques provide authentication and encryption of the communication with a service provider. However they do not provide the user with means to control, measure or even know how a service provider will actually use personal information. It is very important to have the mechanisms in place that allow users to trust these services, as trust is a pre-requisite for the acceptance of the services by their users. A user must be able to make an informed decision to trust a service provider on the basis of facts, such as reputation, and security attributes. Appropriate tools will assist the user in making correct judgments.

Healthcare services deal with very personal and private information. Home healthcare services monitor patients and gather data that is interpreted by medical professionals. Health and wellness services support people in need in many ways on the basis of personal and health related information. People in health communities share health and wellbeing information which then becomes potentially available to the whole community and beyond.

The main questions that this project will address are the following:
- Can a physician trust data measured by a patient at home? Home healthcare patients measure physiological parameters at home, and a physician uses this data to make treatment and diagnosis decisions. It is very important that the measurements are accurate and that a physician can accept them as medical information.
- Can health and wellness services create a transparent view of how they use personal information?
- The personal information that health and wellness services use is highly privacy sensitive. Consumers can trust services that create transparency and that limit access to personal information strictly to what is needed to provide the service.
- Can the electronic healt records and other sources of patient’s health data be used for clinical research and clinical decision support in a privacy preserving way without labor-intensive data anonymization?
- Patients and consumers want the possibility to control their personal health information on social networks. How can patients participate in social networks while ensuring their privacy and controlling the use of information in a simple intuitive way?

THeCS will create measurable and enforceable trust. This notion is new for electronic healthcare services (and for internet services in general), and it is fundamental for their success. It builds on well known tools like identity management and SSL that offer secure communications and storage. THeCS creates new techniques to measure and control the reliability and use of (healthcare) information. These techniques allow users and service providers to trust each other and to benefit from these new services. In a healthcare setting, trust is of special relevance because of the sensitive and personal nature of health information and because of the possibly very adverse consequences of late or incorrect decisions related to one’s health. Trust establishment is crucial for physicians and service providers as they will use healthcare services to implement and extent (medical) treatments.

The goal of this project is to create and define:
- the ethical, legal, sociological and psychological requirements for trust in healthcare services. The spectrum of healthcare services is very wide, ranging from formal medical services to pure commercial services that support every day activities. Often these services share information. It is this integration of services from different domains and information sharing that is of particular interest.
- a technical protocol to reliably assess the quality of medical data (e.g., blood pressure) measured by patients at home, e.g., identification of the patient, compliance with measurement protocol, certification of the measurement device. - a cryptographic technology that enables health service providers to process encrypted medical information so that only intended operations are possible and that information is not disclosed otherwise. A specific example is categorization of a community into groups of patients with similar (according to a definition relevant for healthcare) characteristics, without disclosing the characteristics of individual patients.
- a cryptographic technology for privacy preserving data mining of patient health data to support clinical research and knowledge creation for clinical decision support systems. The project will make unique contributions to (inter)national standards for trust in healthcare services.

THeCS is carried out within the framework of COMMIT, a public-private research consortium. Close partners are the Dutch Universities of Technology, the Netherlands biggest rehabilitation institution, Roessing, the Waag Society, Capgemini and Irdeto. Contact: dr. Anton Vedder

Robolaw
TILT has recently received the funding for a new project called, "Regulating Emerging Robotic Technologies in Europe: Robotics facing Law and Ethics" in short Robolaw. TILT is one of the 4 partners working on the project which will run for 24 months. This is an FP7 EU-funded project (STREP). The main objective of this research project is to investigate the ways in which emerging technologies in the field of (bio-)robotics (e.g. bionics, neural interfaces and nanotechnologies) have a bearing on the content, meaning and setting of hard versus soft law. We will research the ways in which regulation (both in terms of soft and hard law) may be affected by, and even in need of adjustment in light of advances in robotics, with a special focus on human enhancement. To do so we will analyse the current state-of-the-art of legislation and regulation pertaining to robotics, and we will point towards areas of regulation that are in need of adjustment or revision due to the advent of emerging robotics technologies. Moreover, we will study the interrelations between technical, legal and moral norms in this field, in order to define what could be the best balance between them, and to promote a technically feasible, yet also ethically and legally sound basis for future robotics developments. Uncovering ethical values embedded into robotics technologies, and ethical consequences arising from their use, is another key element of this research. The most important outcome of the research will consist of a "White Book on Regulating Robotics", which will contain regulatory guidelines for the European Commission, in order to establish of a solid framework of 'robolaw' in Europe. Contact: prof. Ronald Leenes


VIRTUOSO
Sponsored by the European Commission as part of EC Security Research Call 2 of 7th Framework Programme, specifically for activity 10.3 "Intelligent surveillance and enhancing border security", Virtuoso aims to provide the security authorities with an advanced integrated toolkit, developed around an "open" architecture to exploit open source information for decision support . Providing at each step actionable, rated, validated information. Integrated in an open framework in order to accept existing or future tools. Compliant with legal and ethical issues. The VIRTUOSO toolkit will be the association of several components that can be grouped into two classes: infrastructural components and functional components. The functional components constitute the core of the VIRTUOSO toolkit and include all the data processing components that will involve in finding, selecting, and acquiring information from public sources and analyzing it to provide relevant information useful to the decision-maker. The infrastructural components will be developed to ensure the interactivity and the collaboration between the functional components to accomplish a given user need. The main functional components of the VIRTUOSO system are: Information Gathering components (Acquisition), Information Extraction and Structuring components (Processing), Knowledge Acquisition components (knowledge management), Decision support and visualization components. Contact: dr. Colette Cuijpers

Social dimensions of privacy
Generally, privacy is considered to be a thoroughly individualistic notion. The value of privacy is often entirely understood in terms of individual freedom and individual well-being. The protection and maintenance of privacy is conceived in terms of control and discretion exercised by the individual. This collaborative project of TILT and the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam tries to develop a normatively adequate and practically feasible account of the social dimensions of privacy. TILT staff is engaged in conceptual analysis and in sociological research. Building on an analysis of the different ways in which the social dimensions of privacy have been conceptualized in the normative philosophical and academic legal debates up until now and on sociological enquiries of social network site users’opinions, they will propose a new conceptualization of the social dimensions of privacy. This account is meant to enrich and advance the debates on practical, moral and legal dilemmas between privacy and collective values and, to help adapt privacy protection to current and future technological developments, thus counterbalancing the currently prevalent focus on individualistic approaches to privacy.
Contact: dr. Anton Vedder

Privacy-enhanced e-ticketing solutions using location-based services
Location-based services are increasingly available on modern smartphones (iPhones, Blackberries, etc.), and make use of the current location of the device. This feature can also be used for e-ticketing solutions. At the same time, however, location information potentially impacts the privacy of users. The research project will investigate how these services can be employed in e-ticketing solutions in an economically viable, socially acceptable, and legally compliant way, whilst respecting the privacy of the users. The research is focussed on applications within the area of public transport.
Contact: prof. Ronald Leenes