Towards A Biometric Authentication-based Hybrid Trust-computing Approach for Verification of Provider Profiles in Online Healthcare Information Ankur Chattopadhyay, Michael J. Schulz, Clinton Rettler, Katie Turkiewicz, Laleah Fernandez and Askar Ziganshin Department of Information and Computing Sciences University of Wisconsin - Green Bay Green Bay, USA Abstract - With the advent of the Internet and the growth in the use of cyberspace by consumers for online healthcare information (OHI), various researchers from different disciplines have been working on the challenges and threats posed by the issue of cyberchondria, which is related to the cyber psychological aspects of uncertainty, anxiety, quality, and credibility. However, there are few research efforts, which have directly treated the case of cyberchondria as an interdisciplinary trust-computing problem in information assurance. None of these efforts has encountered the reliability issues with OHI, leading to cyberchondria, by handling provider level trust antecedents. OHI based trust research has also never used biometrics to validate multi-dimensional trust constructs, including visual appearance, reputation, familiarity and social identity. Additionally, this research avenue has not handled the trustworthiness of OHI at the provider level through verification of institutional profiles and affiliations. Hence, in order to enhance trustworthiness through verification at the trustee level, this paper conceptualizes and proposes a novel trust-computing model, which is driven by visual recognition based biometric authentication of physician profiles. The uniqueness of this hybrid trust model lies in its biometric-inspired basis and provider-centric approach, along with its fine blend of soft trust and hard trust elements. As an initial proof-of-concept prototype for the proposed approach, an experiment is conducted to demonstrate a potential implementation of this trust-computing model. The experimental results obtained through this prototype implementation are shared as part of this paper. This prototype will drive further innovative experiments with the proposed trust-computing model, and shall form the basis of future trust related research in OHI for addressing cyberchondria. Keywords – antecedents; authentication; biometric; consumer; cyberchondria; hard trust; hybrid trust; online healthcare information; provider; soft trust; visual recognition; verification I. INTRODUCTION The Internet profoundly impacts the way people search for, utilize, and communicate about healthcare information. According to a nationwide survey on Internet use, eight out of ten American adults search online for healthcare information [1]. More specifically, 83% of those surveyed indicated using the Internet to look up a particular disease or medical problem [11]. In short, there is a tremendous amount of OHI available to the typical consumer and there are no standard mechanisms and regulations, including credibility standards for OHI, that embodies or characterizes how to make ‘trust' decisions as online healthcare consumers [37]. Although active OHI users make such ‘trust’ judgments all the time, there is no method or approach to comply with the rationale of making such decisions [40]. The topic of online information trust is a particularly important issue in the context of health information acquisition. While record numbers of U.S. adults are turning to the Internet to self-diagnose, seek treatment options and choose a physician, many people encounter a number of challenges. The inability to find accurate information [2], inconsistent advice or information [10, 24], the inability to make sense of health information [3] and the psychological distress resulting from the information seeking process [4] are all examples of some of these challenges. For example, cyberchondria is the experience of heightened anxiety related to medical disorders resulting from online health information seeking [5]. Research in this field suggests that some people are particularly vulnerable to bouts of distress related to online information seeking. Individuals with high health anxiety seek online health information more frequently and spend longer searching online. Individuals with high health anxiety find searching for health information online more distressing and anxiety provoking. At the same time, levels of health anxiety are positively related to the frequency and the duration of online health information searches [6]. This cyclical pattern of distress in information seeking have detrimental effects on the individual, who is generally already suffering from an acute or chronic health condition that prompted the initial search. The notion of trust can be attributed to a multi- dimensional, multi-disciplinary concept with a complex interpersonal connotation and social context [11, 12, 14, 20, 23, 37]. However, the OHI seeking and cyberchondria related trust issues have never been researched from the perspective of soft trust and hard trust components [40] as applicable in computing disciplines [27, 34]. One important component of trust has to do with user rejection or selection of a particular site, it stands to reason that consumers will engage with sites they view as trustworthy and reject those they mistrust [10, 24]. Research in the area of online health information trusts suggest mistrust of websites is based on design factors, including the use of images [3] while trust of websites is based on content factors such as source credibility and 2017 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops © 2017, Ankur Chattopadhyay. Under license to IEEE. DOI 10.1109/SPW.2017.23 56