MedTrust: Towards trust-assured social networking for healthcare

Online social networks have enabled communication, collaboration and information sharing in the healthcare domain. Despite the benefits offered by new healthcare social networking applications, there are many challenges. The unique trust and privacy requirements of healthcare make trust management an utmost important issue. In this paper, we propose a personalized self-managed trust model, MedTrust, to establish trust relationships among participating healthcare social network users. The model identifies key trust factors in a healthcare social networking environment, and uses fuzzy logic to represent and evaluate trust. Experiments were conducted and demonstrated that our approach can generate accurate and realistic outcomes in assessing trust and predicting the scope and impact of different trust factors.