AVATAR

AVATAR: Anonymization of personal health data by generating digital avatars

The project

In our project, we are pursuing an innovative approach to anonymizing personal health data. All data collected from studies, medical care, fitness areas and health applications is fed into a decentralized data pool. Data with the required characteristics is extracted from this data pool on request and used to generate digital avatars. These avatars are based on real data and serve as anonymized artificial persons. This makes it impossible to trace the real data donors and opens up practical possibilities for using a large amount of existing data for the first time.

The aim of the proposed competence cluster is to research concepts for enabling the privacy-compliant sharing of personal data through the generation of AVATARs. The long-term goal is to fully exploit the potential of digitization and the applications, services and business models based on it in Germany for the benefit of social and individual health, thereby achieving a competitive advantage.

Another advantage is that the operation in the European cloud “GAIA-X” offers a vendor-neutral and standardized solution. This is particularly important due to the sensitive nature of personal health data.

Solutions

To enable efficient data collection and processing from different stakeholders, standardized interfaces are needed for secure data exchange. Fraunhofer IOSB-AST is building on the current developments of GAIA-X and further developing existing technologies and MVPs. A particular focus is on the Dataspace connector. The aim is to execute the anonymization routines directly in the connector to ensure that the data is correctly anonymized before it leaves the source system. The connector and the GAIA-X federation will be implemented as a proof of concept. In the further course, self2x approaches for a resilient connector will be developed and tested. Fraunhofer IOSB-AST is creating a concept for the GAIA-X demonstrator and its transfer into a productive environment. The demonstrator will be put into operation as a proof of concept in the real-world laboratory. There is an exchange with other GAIA-X projects in the medical field to enable them to donate data to AVATAR.