Providing location privacy in assisted living environments

While pervasive technology becomes more widely used in assisted living environments, it becomes more important to preserve the privacy of patients being monitored. Location data of patients can be collected through sensors for behavior patterns analysis, and they can also be shared among researchers for further research for early disease diagnosis. However, sharing location information also introduces privacy concerns. A series of consecutive location samples can be considered as a trajectory of a single person, and this may leak private information if obtained by malicious users. In this paper, this problem is discussed and a location randomization algorithm is proposed to protect users' location privacy. We defined privacy metrics according to location privacy and proposed a method using dynamic mix zones to confound trajectories of two or more persons.