Development of extensible secure data-sharing system-of-systems solution for health applications at Sheffield Hallam University on FindAPhD.com

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Dr Soumya Basu, Dr Carlos Da Silva, Prof S Kelly No more applications being accepted Competition Funded PhD Project (Students Worldwide)

Sheffield United Kingdom Information Systems Software Engineering

About the Project

The Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC) at Sheffield Hallam University, conducts interdisciplinary activities combining health and wellbeing, and physical activity as rehabilitation and treatment in the care system.

As part of its activities the AWRC hosts a plethora of projects, gathering and analysing different kinds of data. Most of the activities involve some type of data collection, from anonymous surveys conducted to gauge general population feeling about a subject to personal identifiable information such as age, medical conditions and body measurements. Those are collected as part of research and consultancy projects and AWRC activities, which provide tangible benefits to participants.

Not only is this data originating from different sensitive sources, but there is a need for secure data ownership, maintenance and sharing, while maintaining integrity and confidentiality. This demand exemplifies the need for the AWRC: the collection and managed sharing of diverse data sets with severe restrictions on identifiable data. Such integration must consider both intra-(vertical) and inter-projects (horizontal). In addition, there is a demand in the AWRC for the collection of a standardised minimum set of measures from the users to generate a cohort of physical activity measures from people who rarely are included in physical activity measures – namely the ill, unhealthy, and disabled. This data can be used later for research and analysis activities.

In this context, this project aims to research and develop a solution for privacy preserving data sharing and analysis (Fung et al., 2010), with a focus on supporting both vertical (inside the same project) and horizontal (between different projects) data sharing. We intend to adopt a system-of-systems perspective for the different projects running in the AWRC. This is a software engineering approach for construction of software that are aggregates of other systems (Nielsen et al., 2015), thus supporting the independence between projects but allowing the secure sharing of information between them. Moreover, the project has a strong requirement in terms of digital identity management and access control, with strict auditing mechanisms regarding access to the data. We plan to develop a generic framework that will allow the AWRC to develop future projects and applications incorporating the techniques researched and developed by the project to be able to deal with new projects and/or provide a test bed for dealing with the data security issues that arise when using new technology in healthcare settings.

Eligibility

Information on entry requirements can be found on our GTA program page

How to apply

We strongly recommend you contact the lead academic, Dr Soumya Sankar Basu ([Email Address Removed]), to discuss your application.

Please visit our GTA program page for more information on the Graduate teaching assistant program and how to apply. Any questions on the graduate teaching assistant programme requirements can be addressed to the postgraduate research tutor for this area which is Dr Marjory Da Costa Abreu ([Email Address Removed]).

Start date for studentship: October 2022

Interviews are scheduled for: Late June – Early July 2022

For information on how to apply please visit our GTA program page

Your application should be emailed to [Email Address Removed] by the closing date of 31st May 2022.

Funding Notes

Please see GTA program page for funding information.

References

· Fung, B. C. M., Wang, K., Fu, A. W.-C., & Yu, P. S. (2010). Introduction to Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing (0 ed.). Chapman and Hall/CRC. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781420091502 · Nielsen, C. B., Larsen, P. G., Fitzgerald, J., Woodcock, J., & Peleska, J. (2015). Systems of Systems Engineering: Basic Concepts, Model-Based Techniques, and Research Directions. ACM Computing Surveys, 48(2), 18:1-18:41. https://doi.org/10.1145/2794381
· Mariana Cunha, Ricardo Mendes, João P. Vilela, A survey of privacy-preserving mechanisms for heterogeneous data types, Computer Science Review, Volume 41, 2021, 100403, ISSN 1574-0137, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosrev.2021.100403.
· H. Xiong, H. Zhang and J. Sun, "Attribute-Based Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing for Dynamic Groups in Cloud Computing," in IEEE Systems Journal, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 2739-2750, Sept. 2019, doi: 10.1109/JSYST.2018.2865221.
· Man Ho Au, Tsz Hon Yuen, Joseph K. Liu, Willy Susilo, Xinyi Huang, Yang Xiang, Zoe L. Jiang, “A general framework for secure sharing of personal health records in cloud system” ,Journal of Computer and System Sciences, Volume 90, 2017, Pages 46-62, ISSN 0022-0000, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcss.2017.03.002
· Kassaye Yitbarek Yigzaw, Sílvia Delgado Olabarriaga, Antonis Michalas, Luis Marco-Ruiz, Christiaan Hillen, Yiannis Verginadis, Marcela Tuler de Oliveira, Dagmar Krefting, Thomas Penzel, James Bowden, Johan Gustav Bellika, Taridzo Chomutare, Chapter 14 - Health data security and privacy: Challenges and solutions for the future, Editor(s): Evelyn Hovenga, Heather Grain, Roadmap to Successful Digital Health Ecosystems, Academic Press, 2022, Pages 335-362, ISBN 9780128234136, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-823413-6.00014-8.