Decentralized Care Support App

Motivation

Healthcare and care networks are complex social systems in which informal learning plays a major role. Particularly in the care of relatives and close associates, competencies are predominantly acquired through hands-on practice. Since care dependency often arises unexpectedly, people in need of care and their relatives and related caregivers, as a caring community, require reliable and individually tailored information. Digital health applications can provide this support; however, they also entail data protection risks that may lead to overload or rejection. Privacy-compliant and secure solutions are therefore essential to build trust and improve the quality of home-based care.

Objectives and Approach

The project “DECURA” aims to develop a digital solution to support home-based care. To this end, a decentralized system architecture will be developed to enable the privacy-compliant provision of care applications to individuals in need of care and their caregiving community. The solution seeks to strengthen the autonomy of people in need of care and their caring community, as well as to improve the quality of care provided at home. The project focuses on the decentralized processing of health data on the devices of those concerned, alongside the provision of personalized learning and care services. In doing so, the project addresses the issue of declining trust in more centralized data processing models and the associated concerns regarding data protection. To this end, the project analyzes the legal and organizational framework conditions in order to identify existing barriers to decentralized systems in healthcare and to develop practical solution approaches.

Innovation and Perspectives

Digital health solutions for home-based care that rely on decentralized technologies and local data processing remain largely underexplored. By combining informal learning networks with secure, individually tailored digital content, trust in digital health applications is strengthened, care quality is improved, and digital inclusion is promoted. Moreover, the project contributes to scientific advancement and opens up new economic opportunities in the healthcare sector.
 

Research Work of the Chair

From a legal perspective, the decentralization of the system architecture can contribute to the implementation of the principle of data minimization, but it may also give rise to challenges in determining responsibilities and enforcing data subject rights. In the field of health data processing, the adoption of the European Health Data Space (EHDS) Regulation and the German Health Data Utilization Act (GDNG), as well as recent case law, have raised new legal questions that have so far been insufficiently addressed in academic literature.

Within the project, the Chair of Legal Informatics is responsible for cross-cutting legal analyses. This includes, among other tasks, an examination of data protection requirements for the processing of personal data by the DECURA system, an analysis of the EHDS requirements for the primary and secondary use of health data, and an assessment and evaluation of future applicable key requirements of the AI Act in conjunction with Regulation (EU) 2017/745 on medical devices.