The current information systems for the registration and control of electronic medical records (EMR) present a series of problems in terms of the fragmentation, security, and privacy of medical information, since each health institution, laboratory, doctor, etc. has its own database and manages its own information, without the intervention of patients. This situation does not favor effective treatment and prevention of diseases for the population, due to potential information loss, misinformation, or data leaks related to a patient, which in turn may imply a direct risk for the individual and high public health costs for governments. One of the proposed solutions to this problem has been the creation of electronic medical record (EMR) systems using blockchain networks; however, most of them do not take into account the occurrence of connectivity failures, such as those found in various developing countries, which can lead to failures in the integrity of the system data. To address these problems, HealthyBlock is presented in this paper as an architecture based on blockchain networks, which proposes a unified electronic medical record system that considers different clinical providers, with resilience in data integrity during connectivity failure and with usability, security, and privacy characteristics. On the basis of the HealthyBlock architecture, a prototype was implemented for the care of patients in a network of hospitals. The results of the evaluation showed high efficiency in keeping the EMRs of patients unified, updated, and secure, regardless of the network clinical provider they consult.

Electronic Medical Records - EMR has been an increasingly major area of research in order to improve quality of health services, by reducing attention time, probability of errors and helping all the actors in the ecosystem for accountability and traceability. However, patients are probably one of the actors that, despite being the main actor to be protected by regulations, have the least access to its information and control over what, who, when, how and why other actors in the healthcare system are doing with their information, especially in cases where just the existence of some tests may reveal an illness or a condition that should remain private. There is existing work and regulations on defining user-centered access control to the data, but the options are usually focused on defining policies on who has access to the information. This work introduces an incremental data access options in order to increase privacy over the data by considering the possibility of offering slightly altered or obfuscated data as an option to protect the original information, revealing just enough to enable the desired services. A differential privacy classification of access is presented, tested on lab data and evaluated, showing that different levels of privacy protection can be used in certain cases and for a limited number of services, while preserving privacy of the data. In addition, this technique can be integrated with other access-control techniques in literature.

Introduction: The use of mobile applications has increased in the last years. Most of them require the knowledge of the user location, either for their core service or for marketing purposes. Location-based services (LBS) offer context-based assistance to users based on their location. Although these applications ask the user for permission to use their location and even explain in detail how this information will be used in its terms and conditions, most users are not aware or even interested in the fact that their location information is stored in databases and monetized by selling it to third-party companies. Regarding this situation, we developed a study with the aim to assess perception, concerns and awareness from users about their location information. Methods: This work is based on an exploratory survey applied to the university community, mainly from the North Coast of Colombia, to measure the perception of location privacy of users with mobile devices. The questionnaire was applied using Google Forms. The survey has nineteen questions organized in three sections: personal information, identification of privacy and privacy management. These questions were designed to know the users’ perceptions of privacy concerns in LBS and any actions they take to preserve it. Results: The results show that, in general, the respondents do not have a real concern regarding the privacy of their geolocation data, and the majority is not willing to pay to protect their privacy. Conclusions: This type of surveys can generate awareness among participants about the use of their private information. The results expose in this paper can be used to create government policies and regulations by technology companies about the privacy management.

The article text is in Spanish only. No English title or abstract were provided.

With 40 million amputees living in poor countries with limited access to health care, there is a significant need for novel prosthetic solutions. This paper presents our preliminary results to develop sustainable prostheses for five upper-extremity amputee patients in Colombia, South America. We utilized a patient-centric methodology, engaging patients at every stage in an effort to increase their satisfaction with their prosthetic and to assess clinical usefulness. We identified patient-specific criteria and compared existing open source hardware systems using the Design Thinking methodology. Finally, we present these data to further the development of myoelectric prosthetics as part of cyber-physical systems.