RoboChain: A Secure Data-Sharing Framework for Human-Robot Interaction
This addresses privacy concerns in data sharing for robots in healthcare settings, but it is incremental as it builds on existing technologies like blockchain and open data access.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling secure data sharing among multiple robot units in human-robot interaction, particularly for mobile health applications, by introducing RoboChain, a framework that combines blockchain and machine learning to allow decentralized learning without compromising user privacy.
Robots have potential to revolutionize the way we interact with the world around us. One of their largest potentials is in the domain of mobile health where they can be used to facilitate clinical interventions. However, to accomplish this, robots need to have access to our private data in order to learn from these data and improve their interaction capabilities. Furthermore, to enhance this learning process, the knowledge sharing among multiple robot units is the natural step forward. However, to date, there is no well-established framework which allows for such data sharing while preserving the privacy of the users (e.g., the hospital patients). To this end, we introduce RoboChain - the first learning framework for secure, decentralized and computationally efficient data and model sharing among multiple robot units installed at multiple sites (e.g., hospitals). RoboChain builds upon and combines the latest advances in open data access and blockchain technologies, as well as machine learning. We illustrate this framework using the example of a clinical intervention conducted in a private network of hospitals. Specifically, we lay down the system architecture that allows multiple robot units, conducting the interventions at different hospitals, to perform efficient learning without compromising the data privacy.