Towards a Trusted Marketplace for Wearable Data

Recent advances in wearable technology and the rapid adoption of wearable devices have led to a paradigm shift in the way health related data is generated, stored, and consumed. There are increased opportunities for setting up innovative wearable data markets where real-time, user-generated health data can be easily bought and sold. However, there are several challenges associated with safeguarding the consent, security, and privacy of all market participants, particularly the data owners. In this paper, we discuss some of these challenges and propose a conceptual framework and reference architecture for wearable data marketplaces that builds on top of blockchain technology, and facilitates and incentivises trustworthy data sharing. In particular, we propose an approach whereby user-defined data-sharing policies translate to executable smart contracts to facilitate the data exchange between the data subject and the data consumer. We illustrate how the proposed approach works through an use case scenario.