Mobile Apps for People with Dementia: Are They Compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?

Joana Muchagata, Ana Ferreira

2019

Abstract

Mobile apps have the potential to improve the overall patients and caregivers’ quality of life and, particularly, of those with dementia. The ability to stimulate cognitive functions, keep the brain active and helping people to be as independent as possible in their daily lives are considered highly valued characteristics. But despite those advantages, there is a lack of security standards and guidelines focused on mobile apps and the general sense is that those provide low or no privacy/security and commonly do not comply with current regulations. We analysed eighteen apps with the ability to stimulate cognitive functions for people with dementia to verify if they were GDPR compliant. Results show that most analysed apps (78%) do not provide any information regarding how personal data are processed, and if they do, this is not clear. Also, users’ consent to allow that processing is rarely sought (11%). In conclusion, GDPR mandated requirements are still not implemented in most of the analysed mental health apps to ensure privacy and security in the interactions between users and mobile apps. This work intends to bring awareness to this issue to both researchers and developers, especially in the area of healthcare and mental health.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Muchagata J. and Ferreira A. (2019). Mobile Apps for People with Dementia: Are They Compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?. In Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2019) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF; ISBN 978-989-758-353-7, SciTePress, pages 68-77. DOI: 10.5220/0007352200680077

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf19,
author={Joana Muchagata and Ana Ferreira},
title={Mobile Apps for People with Dementia: Are They Compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2019) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF},
year={2019},
pages={68-77},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0007352200680077},
isbn={978-989-758-353-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2019) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF
TI - Mobile Apps for People with Dementia: Are They Compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?
SN - 978-989-758-353-7
AU - Muchagata J.
AU - Ferreira A.
PY - 2019
SP - 68
EP - 77
DO - 10.5220/0007352200680077
PB - SciTePress