mHealth Applications: Can User-adaptive Visualization and Context Affect the Perception of Security and Privacy?

Through mobile applications, patients and health professionals are able to access and monitor health data. But even with user-adaptive systems, which can adjust interface content according to individual’s needs and context (e.g., physical location), data privacy can be at risk, as these techniques do not aim to protect them or even identify the presence of vulnerabilities. The main goal of this paper is to test with end-users the adaptive visualization techniques, together with the context where they are used, to understand how these may influence users’ security perception, and decide which techniques can be applied to improve security and privacy of visualized data. An online survey was applied to test two different use-cases and contexts, where traditional access and access using visualization techniques are compared in terms of security characteristics. Preliminary results with 27 participants show that when accessing personal data from a patients’ perspective, the context has higher influence in the perception of confidentiality (authorized access) and integrity (authorized modification) of visualized data while for a health professional’s perspective, independently of the context, the visualization techniques are the ones that seem to primarily influence participants’ choices for those security characteristics. For availability (data available to authorized users whenever necessary), both visualization techniques and context have little, or no influence, in the participants’ choice.