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Funding: Partially supported by Austrian FWF Fellowship M 3338-N (AH). Endometriosis is a complex, poorly understood, female health condition that can markedly reduce a woman’s quality of life. The gold-standard diagnostic method for endometriosis is invasive laparoscopic surgery, which is costly, not timely, and comes with risks to the patient. We argue that the need for a non-invasive diagnosis procedure, higher quality of patient care and reduced diagnosis delay, can be fulfilled by advances and research to devise innovative computational solutions. To leverage computational and algorithmic techniques, enhanced data recording and sharing are vital. We discuss the potential benefits of using personalised computational healthcare on both the clinician and patient side, reducing the lengthy average diagnosis time (currently around 8 years). Publisher PDF

The work has been partially supported by the EU Horizon 2020 Grant 826278 “Securing Medical Data in Smart Patient-Centric Healthcare Systems” (Serums), and by a new European project, TRUSTID - Intelligent and Continuous Online Student Identity Management for Improving Security and Trust in European Higher Education Institutions, which is funded by the European Commission within the Erasmus+ 2020 Programme. The Third International Workshop on Adaptive and Personalized Privacy and Security (APPS 2021) aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on diverse topics related to understanding and improving the usability of privacy and security software and systems, by applying user modeling, adaptation and personalization principles. Our special focus in 2021 is on challenges and opportunities related to the Covid-19 outbreak, more specifically on ensuring security and privacy of sensitive data and secure user interactions in online systems. The third edition of the workshop includes interdisciplinary contributions from Belgium, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Portugal, the Netherlands, and United Kingdom, that introduce new and disruptive ideas, suggest novel solutions, and present research results about various aspects (theory, applications, tools) for bringing user modeling, adaptation and personalization principles into privacy and systems security. This summary gives a brief overview of APPS 2021, held online in conjunction with the 29th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (ACM UMAP 2021). Postprint

Funding: NHS Lothian, the DATALab, and the EU H2020 project Serums: Securing Medical Data in Smart Patient-Centric Healthcare Systems(grant code:826278). The Edinburgh Cancer Centre (ECC) contains NHS Lothian cancer patient data from multiple resources. However, the lack of proxy between numerous scattered resources hinders the capability to use the information collected in a useful way. ECC data is very varied and includes patient characteristics (e.g., age, weight, height, gender), information on diagnosis (e.g., stage, site, comorbidities) and treatments (e.g., surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy). The visualisation of a fraction of ECC data in the form of a patient timeline can aid and enhance the process of observing and identifying the overall condition of the patient, as well as understand how it may compare with cohorts of patients with similar characteristics. We have previously developed machine learning models for predicting treatment outcomes for breast cancer patient data that have undergone chemotherapy. In this paper, we describe, examine, and propose a solution to connect all these aspects and provide a bridge for several resources. This will make it easier for clinicians and other healthcare professionals to support service planning, deliver better quality of care and consequently improve service outcome within NHS Lothian. Publisher PDF

Healthcare involves complex decision making from planning to resource management. Resources in hospitals are usually allocated by experienced managers,however, due to an inherent process complexity, decisions are surrounded by uncertainties, variabilities, and constraints. Information Systems must be robust enough to provide support to stakeholders, capable of controlling and support work flows. The present work explores the required synergy when combining business processes with discrete event simulation. The objective is to estimate performance indices and address capacity management of a surgical center as a case study. Postprint

This research is funded by the EU H2020 project SERUMS (grant 826278). We thank all project partners for contributions on the overall system development and PoC system design and evaluation. Advances in computer communication technology have enabled the rapid growth of e-health services for delivering healthcare, such as facilitating online consent and data sharing between patients and health professionals. Developing a patient-centric healthcare system is challenging because by necessity, it should be secure, reliable, and resilient to cyber threats, whilst remaining user-friendly. Key to any development aiming for a refined proof-of-concept (PoC) system is the pursuit of comprehensive public system testing and evaluation. This paper focuses on the methodology and results obtained from the participatory approach adopted by the EU H2020 project Serums to evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness of a smart healthcare system based on emergent technologies like blockchain, data lake, and multi-factor authentication. We discuss the challenges faced by remote PoC system evaluations with end-users as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic. Publisher PDF

Funding information: This research has been partially supported by the EU Horizon 2020 Grant 826278 "Securing Medical Data in Smart Patient-Centric Healthcare Systems" (Serums) , and the Research and Innovation Foundation (Project DiversePass: COMPLEMENTARY/0916/0182). This paper proposes a user-adaptable and personalized authentication paradigm for healthcare organizations, which anticipates to seamlessly reflect patients’ episodic and autobiographical memories to graphical and textual passwords aiming to improve the security strength of user-selected passwords and provide a positive user experience. We report on a longitudinal study that spanned over three years in which three public European healthcare organizations participated in order to design and evaluate the aforementioned paradigm. Three studies were conducted (n=169) with different stakeholders: i) a verification study aiming to identify existing authentication practices of the three healthcare organizations with diverse stakeholders (n=9); ii) a patient-centric feasibility study during which users interacted with the proposed authentication system (n=68); and iii) a human guessing attack study focusing on vulnerabilities among people sharing common experiences within location-aware images used for graphical passwords (n=92). Results revealed that the suggested paradigm scored high with regards to users’ likeability, perceived security, usability and trust, but more importantly it assists the creation of more secure passwords. On the downside, the suggested paradigm introduces password guessing vulnerabilities by individuals sharing common experiences with the end-users. Findings are expected to scaffold the design of more patient-centric knowledge-based authentication mechanisms within nowadays dynamic computation realms. Postprint

Funding: This research is funded by the EU H2020 project Serums (Securing Medical Data in Smart Patient-Centric Healthcare Systems), grant code 826278. With an increasing trend in personalised healthcare provision across Europe, we need solutions to enable the secure transnational sharing of medical records, establishing granular access rights to personal patient data. Access rules can establish what should be accessible by whom for how long, and comply with collective regulatory frameworks, such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The challenge is to design and implement such systems integrating novel technologies like Blockchain and Data Lake to enhance security and access control. The blockchain module must deal with adequate policies and algorithms to guarantee that no data leaks occur when authorising data retrieval requests. The data lake module tackles the need for an efficient way to retrieve potential granular data from heterogeneous data sources. In this paper, we define a patient-centric authorisation approach, incorporating a structured format for composing access rules that enable secure data retrieval and automatic rules conflict checking. Postprint