A legal framework for an elderly healthcare platform: A privacy and data protection overview

Cognitive problems are increasingly affecting the population, with the elderly being the ones most affected. This problem requires a new approach in terms of medical and social actions, personalisation, and services. The Ambient Assisted Living area provides solutions to allow elderly people to stay in their homes safely and with the appropriate care. The number of Ambient Assisted Living projects is increasing rapidly, leading to large commercial deployment, and most of these projects disregard the privacy and data protection of the users and the information that they process and save. The iGenda project is a Cognitive Assistant inserted in the Ambient Assisted Living area that provides help to users in their daily lives. However, since it requires the transfer of a large amount of private and personal data between the modules of the platform, fundamental rights may be at stake. This paper presents the iGenda platform, the principle rights of data protection and transmission, legal guarantees and latent ethical concerns. Furthermore, the dichotomy between current developments and legal and ethical aspects are explained. To overcome this problem, legal considerations and ethical considerations are presented, embracing appropriate solutions to features that present any threat. (C) 2017 Angelo Costa, Aliaksandra Yelshyna, Teresa C. Moreira, Francisco C.P. Andrade, Vicente Julian, Paulo Novais. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This work has been supported by FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope UID/CEC/00319/2013. A. Costa thanks the Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) Post-Doc scholarship with the Ref. SFRH/BPD/102696/2014. This work is also partially supported by the MINECO/FEDER TIN2012-36586-C03-01