Big Data in IoE in healthcare emergencies: analysis of autonomous emergency response systems in healthcare emergencies

Sophisticated IoT devices are now able to process and monitor real-time undesirable events and provide realtime alerting in accidents involving elderly people, predict outbreak of the diseases, or provide emergency response management in pandemics such as the current Covid-19 crisis. Due to the multidimensional nature of healthcare emergencies, the use of Big Data in such emergencies poses a number questions, not only with respect to the precise definition of an emergency, the agencies involved, the procedures used, but also questions with respect to securing data protection, privacy, and the right to health in such emergencies withoutv hindering the potential benefits of the development of Big Data solutions within healthcare sector. Currently, the research in the healthcare sector focuses either on the development of the ICT solutions for the sector (e.g. various medical devices) or on the regulatory requirements applicable to the sector. Yet, Big Data, privacy and data protection issues tend to be overlooked. In particular, the healthcare sector tends to overlook the two dimensions of healthcare emergencies, the public healthcare and the individual healthcare emergency dimension, and its implications to data protection and privacy. The public dimension of healthcare emergencies refers to emergencies such as global outbreaks of diseases (such as Covid-19, SARS etc.). The latter, instead, refers to loss of vital signs by an individual which would not qualify as a public health emergency but, nonetheless, could have a devastating impact on an individual’s wellbeing. Further, the current state of the art undoubtedly indicates a gap between the appropriate translation and application of fundamental legal research into concrete scenarios with specific ICT technologies used in healthcare sector. As the ethical-legal research world focuses on fostering a high-level discussion on Big Data, healthcare and IoE, the ICT sector wonders what all this means to their specific scenario. The research topic therefore aims at exploring the complex relationship between Big Data tools used in healthcare emergencies, specifically, emergency response systems, and the right to privacy and data protection and how the change of such notions in the digital environment affects Big Data tools. The aim of the research is to analyse how the ICT tools used in such healthcare emergencies allow to strike the balance between sometimes competing interest of the right to health and the right to privacy. Specifically, the research focuses on the analysis of the ICT tools used for public healthcare emergencies, taking as an example tools used for Covid-19, such as the contact tracing apps and immunity passports. On the other hand, the research shall look at the individual dimension of healthcare emergencies, taking as a practical examples heart rate monitors, pacemakers and in-vitro vital sign monitoring tools