Framework for evaluating the trustworthiness of e-health applications

The 'lack of trust' is a major inhibitor in the success of e-health applications. Fears about security are an important aspect of this lack of trust. Concerns about privacy, confidentiality and security have to be addressed quite strongly to attract wide participation and use of e-health applications. The security and privacy for e-health applications must be enhanced to encourage and develop this notion of trust. The main contribution of this thesis is an evaluation framework for assessing the trustworthiness of e-health applications. The thesis also serves as a guide for the developers to help them to integrate trust in a systematic way into e-health applications, thereby enhancing the security of e-health sites and systems. The study achieves in gathering the requirements of the propose framework by examining: Security and privacy requirements of e-health applications; Existing security technologies and mechanisms for e-health; and The notion of trust in e-health, and how the notion of trust can enhance security in e-health applications. The framework presents various attributes and parameters that influence trust in e-health application. Derived primarily from the security and privacy requirements, and the existing security technologies and mechanisms for e-health, the study achieves in modelling scenarios where trust level needs to be inferred.