Health Avatar: An Informatics Platform for Personal and Private Big Data

metadata technology. CCR+ functions as a (data) surrogate of a person in an integrated distributed intelligence platform or the Health Avatar Platform (HAP). HAP is a run-time environment for distributed intelligence programming of health agents, which are expected to provide a variety of health services to CCR+ surrogates with privacy-controlled access to personal and private big data using open application programming interfaces (APIs). One can login with her/his own avatar to the platform, where individual avatars interact with distributed and healthcaregiving agents for real-time personalized medicine. The platform provides open APIs for the developers of distributed agents, a broker to match individual avatars and agents, a secure communication channel for strict privacy control as well as (avatar and agent) profile registries, contract manager, and shared resources. The open APIs permit intelligent agents to have authorized (read and write) access to an avatar’s clinical, genomic, and lifelog data. No storage of personal data is allowed in HAP, except for a very limited set of personal profiles, for privacy reasons; i.e., HAP is free from personal data centralization. Recently, the semantic interoperability of CCR+ has been successfully demonstrated with secure PHR data exchange in a nation-wide pilot system of voluntary patients and five major healthcare institutions; Division of Biomedical Informatics, Seoul National University, Ajou University Hospital, Gachon Ghil Hospital, Pusan National University Hospital, and Chonnam National University Hospital [4]. It has been demonstrated that patients’ access to their own health data from hospitals can be greatly benefited by the Health Avatar project, which in turn enables personalized health data management with personal smartphones. Health Avatar: An Informatics Platform for Personal and Private Big Data