Towards Privacy-Preserving Medical Cloud Computing Using Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract

Personal health monitoring tools, such as commercially available wireless ECG patches, can significantly reduce healthcare costs by allowing patient monitoring outside the healthcare organizations. These tools transmit the acquired medical data into the cloud, which could provide an invaluable diagnosis tool for healthcare professionals. Despite the potential of such systems to revolutionize the medical field, the adoption of medical cloud computing in general has been slow due to the strict privacy regulations on patient health information. We present a novel medical cloud computing approach that eliminates privacy concerns associated with the cloud provider. Our approach capitalizes on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), which enables computations on private health information without actually observing the underlying data. For a feasibility study, we present a working implementation of a long-term cardiac health monitoring application using a well-established open source FHE library.