Special issue on privacy and security on pervasive e‐health and assistive environments

Pervasive e‐health and assistive environments involve new types of interaction among health/assistance providers and patients/elderly people and introduce new ethical issues and threats for privacy. Such environments unobtrusively and transparently support their users, whereas their implementations rely on an increased amount and accuracy of data generated and collected as well as on increased capabilities to process and analyze these data. The users frequently ignore the amount of their personal data being collected and processed or shared wirelessly and how much their privacy may be invaded. Ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive information is a critical prerequisite to creating public trust for pervasive e‐health and assistive environments, which aim to improve patient’s care ina reliableand cost‐effectiveway. It is therefore necessary for pervasive e‐health and assistive environments to be implemented and used in compliance with data subjects’ fundamental rights; moreover, the adoption of specific safeguards is required. In addition, becausemisuseof collected data is easily enabled, preventive measures are needed. Privacy enhancing technologies (PET) are continuously developing; at the same time in recent literature pervasive technology and privacy enhancing technologies are merged in a way that data processing in pervasive scenarios becomes privacy aware and privacy preserving. However, using privacy‐enabling and privacy‐enhancing tools is not always easy. Pervasive computing environments are based on the use of wireless devices that have limited processing power, bandwidth, throughput, memory, and so on. These factors put a resource limitation on implementing resource‐ demanding tools and protocols for privacy protection. In addition, legal support for the widespread use of privacy‐ enhancing technologies is missing, and the introduction of additional legislation should be examined. This Special Issue aims at providing researchers and professionals with an insight on privacy and security on pervasive e‐health and assistive environments. Motivated by the given observations, this Special Issue is organized to accommodate state‐of‐the‐art implementations and research studies on achieving secure and privacy‐preserving pervasive e‐health and assistive environments. The papers presented at the present Special Issue were selected by an open call for papers, which attracted submissions that appeared as preliminary versions in the proceedings of the first workshop on ‘Privacy and Security on Pervasive e‐Health and Assistive Environments (PSPAE 2009)’—held in conjunction with the second international conference on