E-Consent for Data Privacy: Consent Management for Mobile Health Technologies in Public Health Surveys and Disease Surveillance

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2019 Aug 21:264:1223-1227. doi: 10.3233/SHTI190421.

Abstract

Community health workers in primary care programs increasingly use Mobile Health Data Collection Systems (MDCSs) to report their activities and conduct health surveys, replacing paper-based approaches. The mHealth systems are inherently privacy invasive, thus informing individuals and obtaining their consent is important to protect their rights to privacy. In this paper, we introduce an e-Consent tool tailored for MDCSs. It is developed based on the requirement analysis of consent management for data privacy and built upon the solutions of Participant-Centered Consent toolkit and Consent Receipt specification. The e-Consent solution has been evaluated in a usability study. The study results show that the design is useful for informing individuals on the nature of data processing, allowing them to make informed decisions.

Keywords: Mobile health; Privacy; Public surveillance.

MeSH terms

  • Health Surveys
  • Humans
  • Informed Consent
  • Privacy*
  • Public Health
  • Telemedicine*