The new era of mobile health ushered in by the wide adoption of ubiquitous computing and mobile communications has brought opportunities for governments and companies to rethink their concept of healthcare. Simultaneously, the worldwide urbanization process represents a formidable challenge and attracts attention toward cities that are expected to gather higher populations and provide citizens with services in an efficient and human manner. These two trends have led to the appearance of mobile health and smart cities. In this article we introduce the new concept of smart health, which is the context-aware complement of mobile health within smart cities. We provide an overview of the main fields of knowledge that are involved in the process of building this new concept. Additionally, we discuss the main challenges and opportunities that s-Health would imply and provide a common ground for further research.

Upon the General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) application on 25 May 2018 across the European Union, new legal requirements for the protection of personal data will be enforced for data controllers operating within the EU territory. While the principles encompassed by the GDPR were mostly welcomed, two of them, namely the right to withdraw consent and the right to be forgotten, caused prolonged controversy among privacy scholars, human rights advocates and business world due to their pivotal impact on the way personal data would be handled under the new legal provisions and the drastic consequences of enforcing these new requirements in the era of big data and internet of things. In this work, we firstly review all controversies around the new stringent definitions of consent revocation and the right to be forgotten in reference to their implementation impact on privacy and personal data protection, and secondly, we evaluate existing methods, architectures and state-of-the-art technologies in terms of fulfilling the technical practicalities for the implementation and effective integration of the new requirements into current computing infrastructures. The latter allow us to argue that such enforcement is indeed feasible provided that implementation guidelines and low-level business specifications are put in place in a clear and cross-platform manner in order to cater for all possible exceptions and complexities.

Recent advances in hardware and telecommunications have enabled the development of low cost mobile devices equipped with a variety of sensors. As a result, new functionalities, empowered by emerging mobile platforms, allow millions of applications to take advantage of vast amounts of data. Following this trend, mobile health applications collect users health-related information to help them better comprehend their health status and to promote their overall wellbeing. Nevertheless, healthrelated information is by nature and by law deemed sensitive and, therefore, its adequate protection is of substantial importance. In this article we provide an in-depth security and privacy analysis of some of the most popular freeware mobile health applications. We have performed both static and dynamic analysis of selected mobile health applications, along with tailored testing of each application’s functionalities. Long term analyses of the life cycle of the reviewed apps and our GDPR compliance auditing procedure are unique features of the present article. Our findings reveal that the majority of the analyzed applications does not follow well-known practices and guidelines, not even legal restrictions imposed by contemporary data protection regulations, thus jeopardizing the privacy of millions of users.

Due to its critical role in cybersecurity, digital forensics has received significant attention from researchers and practitioners alike. The ever increasing sophistication of modern cyberattacks is directly related to the complexity of evidence acquisition, which often requires the use of several technologies. To date, researchers have presented many surveys and reviews on the field. However, such articles focused on the advances of each particular domain of digital forensics individually. Therefore, while each of these surveys facilitates researchers and practitioners to keep up with the latest advances in a particular domain of digital forensics, the global perspective is missing. Aiming to fill this gap, we performed a qualitative review of all the relevant reviews in the field of digital forensics, determined the main topics on digital forensics topics and identified their main challenges. Despite the diversity of topics and methods, there are several common problems that are faced by almost all of them, with most of them residing in evidence acquisition and pre-processing due to counter analysis methods and difficulties of collecting data from devices, the cloud etc. Beyond pure technical issues, our study highlights procedural issues in terms of readiness, reporting and presentation, as well as ethics, highlighting the European perspective which is traditionally stricter in terms of privacy. Our extensive analysis paves the way for closer collaboration among researcher and practitioners among different topics of digital forensics.