Do you want to be part of one of the greatest privacy & anonymization study programs in recent years? With a few minutes to spare you can now support numerous studies at once!
We, the chair of Legal Informatics of Saarland University, are looking for contributors for our new anonymized health and wearable database. We wish to use this data for studies on anonymization and pseudonymization methods with an additional focus on wearable data. With this database, we hope to enable more in-depth research in this topic and give students a realistic basis for potential bachelor and master theses. Currently, we are focusing on research on the anonymization and deanonymization of step data.
For this overall goal we wish to gather anonymized data extracted from your iPhone’s health app which may include e.g., step data, physical exercises (like swimming or hiking) or health data (like size or heartbeat rate). This data is collected on all iPhones and Apple wearable devices without your explicit interaction. To ensure that the data does not allow any linking to your person, we implemented a HealthTool, which excludes all data to identify you (e.g., device name, device number, username…) and allows you to inspect the data contained in your health file and select the subset you wish to contribute and nothing else. You may inspect the source code of the tool right here in this repository.
We are very grateful for your help by contributing your anonymized wearable data.
For contribution, this is what you need to do:
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Install our tool from one of the following links: Linux, Mac, Windows
Alternatively, you can run this maven project or build it yourself (goal: package) and use the created jar.
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Export your health data (don’t worry, the tool will help you with that) to your notebook / mac book / etc. running our application.
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Use the tool to extract the data you wish to contribute and upload it to our nextcloud server. You can also inspect every file the tool creates throughout the process.
We are sincerely looking forward to your participation which may enable us to take a significant step in the research of wearable and health data!