eConsent management and enforcement in personal telehealth

Advances in information and communication technologies are expected to bring large benefits in the healthcare domain. Personal telehealth is one such example that has the potential to address some of the important challenges currently faced by healthcare such as improvement in the quality of healthcare delivery while at the same time reducing the cost. However concerns about information security and privacy are primary reasons for the lack of deployment of personal telehealth systems, besides problems with regard to safety and integration of multi-vendor systems. In this paper we present consent principles crucial to the privacy protection of individuals. Further, based on these principles, we describe consent management and enforcement functionality as outlined by the Continua Health Alliance and elaborate on how it can enable different usage scenarios with different trust levels and security requirements.