Securing trust in digital care

MULTIPULM Editor
Nov 26, 2025
3 min read

Updated: Jan 19

How MULTIPULM could strengthen its integrated care solutions with ENTRUST

The future of healthcare lies in connected, personalised, and remote care. The MULTIPULM project, a Horizon Europe initiative, is contributing to this transformation by developing a digital platform to improve care for people living with chronic respiratory diseases (CRDs) and multimorbidity in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

As MULTIPULM advances these digital solutions, innovation must go hand in hand with strong and reliable security. Ensuring that patient data is protected, trustworthy, and resilient is essential for long-term adoption. This is where the ENTRUST project could play a key role. The security principles and trust framework developed within ENTRUST, particularly its work on securing wearable devices, offer a valuable blueprint that complements MULTIPULM’s integrated care ecosystem.

MULTIPULM: Digital Monitoring and the Security Imperative

MULTIPULM addresses the urgent challenge of fragmented care and limited access to digital health solutions for people with CRDs in countries such as Brazil, Serbia, and Türkiye. To respond to these challenges, the project is developing an integrated digital ecosystem that supports both patients and clinicians through:

Continuous home monitoring, including tools for breathing assessment, sleep analysis, and lifestyle tracking
Early risk detection, using artificial intelligence-based analytics to identify potential adverse drug effects and predict hospital readmission risks

These solutions rely on connected medical devices, often in the form of home-based sensors and wearables, which collect real-time data from patients. Data on respiratory function, sleep patterns, and multimorbidity management is among the most sensitive data that exists. Any compromise to its integrity or privacy could have serious clinical consequences, such as inaccurate diagnoses or inappropriate changes to treatment plans.

As a project aiming for high impact and large-scale validation, MULTIPULM recognises that long-term sustainability and trust can only be achieved if world-class cybersecurity is embedded from the outset.

ENTRUST: A Zero Trust Blueprint for Wearable Devices

The ENTRUST project was specifically designed to address the lack of strong, standardised cybersecurity approaches for connected medical devices. Its core solution is a Trust Management Framework based on Zero Trust principles, which governs the entire lifecycle of a connected medical device.

One of ENTRUST’s key evaluation scenarios focuses on “wearables for health monitoring”. This use case closely reflects the challenges faced within MULTIPULM, where sensitive health data is collected by remote, resource-constrained devices operating outside traditional clinical environments.

Within this scenario, ENTRUST could directly address threats such as compromised Bluetooth connections or devices, which could allow unauthorised access, data manipulation, or disruption of monitoring services.

Several ENTRUST concepts are particularly relevant for MULTIPULM:

Dynamic trust assessment, where the required trust level of a device is continuously compared with its actual trust level in real time. If irregular behaviour is detected, risks can be assessed and mitigated immediately.
Real-time conformity certificates, often supported by distributed ledger technologies, which verify that a device is safe, compliant, and uncompromised at any given moment. This helps ensure that data used for artificial intelligence analysis and clinical decision support can be trusted at its source.
Lifecycle security management, covering secure design, deployment, updates, and decommissioning, reducing vulnerabilities throughout a device’s operational life.

A Shared Approach to Secure Respiratory Care

The potential synergies between MULTIPULM and ENTRUST are clear. MULTIPULM focuses on developing patient-centred, integrated digital care solutions, while ENTRUST provides the trust and security foundations needed to support these solutions in real-world settings.

By drawing on the ENTRUST Trust Management Framework, MULTIPULM can strengthen:

Data integrity and accuracy, enabling clinicians and analytical models to rely on home monitoring data when managing conditions such as COPD and multimorbidity
Patient confidence, ensuring that individuals using digital tools in Brazil, Serbia, and Türkiye know their personal health data is protected according to the highest European cybersecurity standards
Regulatory readiness, supporting robust conformity assessment and facilitating future integration into national health systems

Integrating ENTRUST principles into MULTIPULM’s digital platform could demonstrate that innovative healthcare delivery and strong cybersecurity are not competing priorities, but rather complementary ones. Together, they offer a model for future Horizon Europe digital health initiatives that aim to deliver equitable, resilient, and trustworthy care.

For more information on ENTRUST:

Contact: Thanos Arvanitidis

The article is edited by Georgia Nikolakopoulou

Communication and Dissemination Manager in Future Needs, leading Dissemination, Communication and networking activities of the MULTIPULM project.