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architecture, a prototype implementation is
presented that is under development. Without the
loss of generality, for the purpose of the prototype
experimental implementation are used the public
cloud infrastructure of Amazon, the social network
of Facebook and the PHR of Microsoft called
HealthVault. Web services based on REST
technology were developed using the open source
Jersey to implement the access control services of
the middleware as well as the middleware
functionality. The HealthVault Application SDK
was used to access data from Microsoft HealthVault
PHR. Regarding the access control mechanism
implementation, the XML access control language
(XACML) is used and XACML policies are created
to represent user sharing preferences that are stored
to the cloud servers using Amazon S3 service
(Wrona et al., 2005). In addition, a web application
loaded in the context of Facebook is created to
provide the user application interface to access the
access control services and the middleware
functionality.
5 CONCLUDING REMARKS
This paper presents a security architecture that aims
at promoting secure patient information sharing
among users at anytime and from anywhere through
the use of SNs that are always available by any
device. In particular, the proposed access control
services ensure authorized patient information
retrieval from PHRs and its provision through SNs
messaging mechanisms and applications/tools
according to user’s access control preferences. To
realize this, there is a need to balance the urge to
protect individuals from potential harm that may be
caused by exposing personal information through
SNs and therefore to ensure that high quality
healthcare can be provided through the use of
eHealth services. In this paper, only the issue of
what other users can see has been addressed.
Questions of how to prevent the organisation in
control of the SN site using personal data which has
been freely shared for commercial gain through SN
functionality are left unanswered. Finally, there are
other problems not addressed here, such as legal and
ethical issues (Cushman et al., 2010).
The proposed security approach constitutes a
technological solution that is clearly implementable.
At present the development of the prototype is still
in the early stage. Thus, testing, user acceptance,
validation, evaluation and performance count on real
use of the eHealth services are still to be done.
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