Exploiting Social Network to Enhance Human-to-Human Infection Analysis Without Privacy Leakage

Human-to-human infection, as a type of fatal public health threats, can rapidly spread in a human population, resulting in a large amount of labor and health cost for treatment, control and prevention. To slow down the spread of infection, social network is envisioned to provide detailed contact statistics to isolate susceptive people who has frequent contacts with infected patients. In this paper, we propose a novel human-to-human infection analysis approach by exploiting social network data and health data that are collected by social network and e-healthcare technologies. We enable the social cloud server and health cloud server to exchange social contact information of infected patients and user’s health condition in a privacy-preserving way. Specifically, we propose a privacy-preserving data query method based on conditional oblivious transfer to guarantee that only the authorized entities can query users’ social data and the social cloud server cannot infer anything during the query. In addition, we propose a privacy-preserving classification-based infection analysis method that can be performed by untrusted cloud servers without accessing the users’ health data. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed approach achieves higher infection analysis accuracy with the acceptable computational overhead.