FED-EHR: A Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning Framework for Decentralized Healthcare Analytics

Abstract

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is revolutionizing healthcare by enabling continuous monitoring and real-time data collection through interconnected medical devices such as wearable sensors and smart health monitors. These devices generate sensitive physiological data, including cardiac signals, glucose levels, and vital signs, that are integrated into electronic health records (EHRs). Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques have shown significant potential for predictive diagnostics and decision support based on such data. However, traditional centralized ML approaches raise significant privacy concerns due to the transmission and aggregation of sensitive health information. Additionally, compliance with data protection regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), restricts centralized data sharing and analytics. To address these challenges, this study introduces FED-EHR, a privacy-preserving Federated Learning (FL) framework that enables collaborative model training on distributed EHR datasets without transferring raw data from its source. The framework is implemented using Logistic Regression (LR) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) models and was evaluated using two publicly available clinical datasets: the UCI Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Diagnostic) dataset and the Pima Indians Diabetes dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that FED-EHR achieves a classification performance comparable to centralized learning, with ROC-AUC scores of 0.83 for the Diabetes dataset and 0.98 for the Breast Cancer dataset using MLP while preserving data privacy by ensuring data locality. These findings highlight the practical feasibility and effectiveness of applying the proposed FL approach in real-world IoMT scenarios, offering a secure, scalable, and regulation-compliant solution for intelligent healthcare analytics.