A privacy-preserving protocol for finding the nearest doctor in an emergency

Abstract

In this work, we define the Nearest Doctor Problem (NDP) for finding the closest doctor in case of an emergency and present a secure multi-party computation for solving it. The solution is based on a privacy-preserving cryptographic protocol and makes use of the current location of each participating doctor. The protocol is efficient and protects the privacy of the location of all doctors. A prototype implementing the proposed solution for a community of doctors that use mobile devices to obtain their current location is presented.