Privacy enhanced cloud-based recommendation service for implicit discovery of relevant support groups in healthcare social networks

Recommending support-groups in healthcare social networks is the problem of detecting for each patient his/her membership to one support-group of relevant patients. The patients in each support-group share some relevant preferences which guarantee that the support-group as a whole satisfies some desired properties of similarity. As a result, forming these support-groups requires the availability of personal data of different patients. This is a crucial requirement for different recommender services. With the increasing trend of service providers to collect a large volume of personal data regarding their end-users, presumably to better serve them. However, a significant part of the data that is typically collected is not essential to the service being offered, or to the completion of the services it was presumably released for. Gathering such unnecessary data can be seen as a privacy threat, and storing it exposes the end-users to further unavoidable risks. In this paper, a privacy enhanced cloud-based recommendation service is proposed for the implicit discovery of appropriate support groups in healthcare social network. A fog based middleware (FMCP) was introduced that runs at patients' sides and allows exchanging of their information to facilities recommending and creating support-groups without disclosing their real preferences to other parties. The membership of patients in various support groups allows receiving highly appropriate and reliable healthcare-related advices. The system utilizes two protocols to attain this goal. Experiments were performed on real dataset.