IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Summer 2014 - 36

VIEWPOINT

JOE CARVALKO

Who Should Own In-the-Body Medical
Data in the Age of eHealth?

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2014.2320136
Date of publication: 4 June 2014

36

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for Disease Control, of impending pandemics, or the
potential transmission of "private" diseases, such as
AIDS, at the level of the individual.
These systems will have the capability to track our
instantaneous physiological condition, update parameters if necessary, and identify location. Clearly, if the
channels between the expert system and our devices
are left wide open to government, commercial, and
nefarious interests - as
some might conclude is
the case with our connection to the Internet - we
might find our cherished
autonomy in jeopardy.
Prospective
"electronic
medicine" will raise privacy and security issues
that will make present
day concerns for medical records privacy seem
benign by comparison.
What price will we
pay in individual liberty and privacy for this level
of social utility? And, importantly who should own
the data? This question leads to the question of who
should have access and control over the data: government, private enterprise, or the individual?
Before we answer these questions, let us distinguish between medical data and medical information.
Medical data consists of electronic data representations directly related to a patient (e.g., heartbeats) as
JOE CARVALKO

W

ithin the next decade, reactive medical practices will evolve into what has
been popularly coined "P4" medicine -
predictive, preventive, personalized, and
participatory - where examinations will take place
at home, where devices connected to the body, externally and internally, will send medical data into the
cloud, where expert systems will analyze and
determine wellness and
disease, as well as tweak,
in real time, personalized
electronic prescriptions
for medical treatment and
anatomical enhancement.
Patients should own this
data, and here is why.
Expert systems will
have the facility to acquire
physiological data from
sensors (e.g., temperature,
electrical activity, oxygen
levels), which will be supplied to processors to draw inferences about medical
conditions using decision trees, neural networks, and
statistical inference engines, to provide for diagnoses
and prognoses. This information will be sent to a physician, and depending on the diagnosis, it may be used
to alert health officials, such as the National Center

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