Motivation
In the era of digital health technologies, including health apps, wearable devices, and electronic health records, there is a significant amount of health-related data being collected that includes or can be associated with geographic information. Such data can be incredibly useful for personalized healthcare, offering tailored health advice, monitoring, and treatment options based on an individual's specific location-based environmental exposures, activities, or access to healthcare services.
However, the collection, storage, and analysis of georeferenced health data raise substantial privacy concerns. There is a risk that such information could be misused if it falls into the wrong hands, leading to potential privacy invasions, discrimination, or other forms of harm. "Geoprivacy for Personalized Health" thus encompasses the technologies, practices, and policies designed to protect individuals' location privacy while enabling the benefits of personalized health services.
The objective of this workshop is to bring together experts in public health, privacy, geographic information science, and related disciplines to discuss the challenges we are currently facing at this research nexus. This will include indepth discussions on topics including data anonymization techniques, secure data storage and transmission protocols, consent mechanisms, and regulations that govern the use of personal location data in healthcare contexts. We anticipate this workshop resulting in the foundations of a coauthored policy/white paper and/or research vision paper.
This is the first of two workshops jointly funded by the Government of Québec and the Luxembourg National Research Fund. The second workshop is scheduled to take place in Luxembourg in 2025.
Broad Objective
From a long-term perspective, we are building a robust collaboration network dedicated to geoprivacy-preserving personal health research, where members can access a diverse pool of complementary expertise (e.g., knowledge in encryption techniques, federated learning, or mobility behaviours) and resources (e.g., data from personal health projects). We particularly welcome computationally minded researchers and health experts who have run projects collecting personal location and health data. This is ultimately to conduct more collaborative, large-scale, and impactful personal health studies across various countries, enabled by geoprivacy preservation techniques.