Towards a decentralized OSN for a privacy-preserving e-health system

e-health could be defined as the cost-effective and secure use of information and communication technologies in support of health systems, including healthcare related services and monitoring at both the local site and at a distance. Challenges still need to be resolved to build reliable, secure, and efficient e-health platforms with great flexibility. Recently, social networks have seen a growing importance in different applications and could play a prominent role in healthcare. Online Social Networks (OSN) offer new possibilities such as easy access to medical data anytime from anywhere. Due to the sensitivity of health data exchanged over such networks, a special attention need to be paid to security and privacy aspects of these data. The use of existing centralized OSNs raises the big brother problem. Moreover, the centralized architectures of OSNs are not scalable and have a single point of failure. In this work, we suggest a layered architecture while promoting the usage of decentralized design to ensure the scalability and the privacy of an OSN-based e-health system. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.