Collecting a citizen´s digital footprint for health data mining

This paper describes a case study for collecting digital footprint data for the purpose of health data mining. The case study involved 20 subjects residing in Finland who were instructed to collect data from registries which they evaluated to be useful for understanding their health or health behaviour, current or past. 11 subjects were active, sending 100 data requests to 49 distinct organizations in total. Our results indicate that there are still practical challenges in collecting actionable digital footprint data. Our subjects received a total of 75 replies (reply rate of 75.0%) and 61 datasets (reception rate of 61%). Out of the received data, 44 datasets (72.1%) were delivered in paper format, 4 (6.6%) in portable document format and 13 (21.3%) in structured digital form. The time duration between the sending of the information requests and reception of a reply was 26.4 days on the average.