A Recommender Privacy Aware Reputation-Based Healthcare System

Abstract

Over the last decade, recommender systems have become an increasingly researched area due to the increased usage of the Internet by users. These systems have been widely applied in e-commerce and service oriented networks. In this study, a new approach has been proposed for the development of a recommender system which deals in a new domain, i.e., healthcare, giving a different edge to these sorts of systems altogether. In this paper, it has been demonstrated how a recommender system can be used in the healthcare domain to provide recommendation to interested users about the optimal healthcare providers. Moreover, given that patient information is sensitive data and need to be protected, we propose a recommender system that takes sensitivity of healthcare information into account. In our proposed architecture, a healthcare user submits ratings anonymously to the system and thus the identity of the user is concealed. Moreover, a user who intends to obtain a recommendation from the system can obtain such recommendation without compromising his identity. Either way, the identity of any user interacting with the system is preserved. Our proposed architecture is reputation-based and allows for the computation of real-valued rankings of healthcare service providers hence giving more fine-grained recommendations.