Privacy Barriers in Health Monitoring: Scoping Review

Health monitoring technologies help patients and older adults live better and stay longer in their own homes. However, there are many factors influencing their adoption of these technologies. Privacy is one of them.

The aim of this study was to provide an overview of the privacy barriers in health monitoring from current research, analyze the factors that influence patients to adopt assisted living technologies, provide a social psychological explanation, and propose suggestions for mitigating these barriers in future research.

A scoping review was conducted, and web-based literature databases were searched for published studies to explore the available research on privacy barriers in a health monitoring environment.

In total, 65 articles met the inclusion criteria and were selected and analyzed. Contradictory findings and results were found in some of the included articles. We analyzed the contradictory findings and provided possible explanations for current barriers, such as demographic differences, information asymmetry, researchers' conceptual confusion, inducible experiment design and its psychological impacts on participants, researchers' confirmation bias, and a lack of distinction among different user roles. We found that few exploratory studies have been conducted so far to collect privacy-related legal norms in a health monitoring environment. Four research questions related to privacy barriers were raised, and an attempt was made to provide answers.

This review highlights the problems of some research, summarizes patients' privacy concerns and legal concerns from the studies conducted, and lists the factors that should be considered when gathering and analyzing people's privacy attitudes.