Security and data protection
How EnaResearch protects research data: pseudonyms, minimum identity, study isolation, small-group suppression, signed audit records and your role.
- Admin panel
- Participant area
- Participant app
EnaResearch handles health data, so privacy is built into each layer: participants appear under pseudonyms, identity is kept to a minimum, studies cannot see each other's data and small groups are hidden in summaries. This article summarizes those safeguards and what stays your organization's responsibility.
Required role
- This is a reference page; you need no role to read it.
Your organization's responsibility
Your organization decides the purpose and legal basis of the research, obtains ethics approval and participants' informed consent, and agrees roles (controller, processor) with ENA Innovation. Depending on where you work, this is assessed under laws such as the GDPR, the UK GDPR, the Swiss FADP or KVKK. EnaResearch gives you tools for this work; it does not make processing compliant on its own, and it makes no claims of clinical accuracy or medical device status.
Safeguards in the product
| Area | Safeguard |
|---|---|
| Hosting | Each organization runs on its own stack, with its own database and storage. Where it is hosted is agreed at setup. |
| Pseudonyms | Participants appear as P001, P002 … in study pages, the dashboard, exports and analyses. |
| Minimum identity | Only the identity needed for matching is stored. The person identifier is kept as a protected hash plus its last 4 characters; an encrypted copy only if the organization turns it on. See Person identifier. |
| Exports | Pseudonym, sex and age at start only; never names, identifiers or birth dates; notes are not exported. |
| Study isolation | Each study sees only data inside its own participation windows and permitted measurement types. |
| Team access | Participants and data are open only to the study team, owners included. |
| Small groups | Group summaries and statistics hide groups with fewer than 5 participants or observations. |
| Participant sign-in | Codes alone never sign in; activation keys are one-time and expire after 14 days; PINs and keys are stored only in hashed form; repeated failures lock the code. |
| Raw data | Incoming raw packages are kept unchanged for 90 days; standard data is a separate, versioned record. |
| Audit | Every protected action is recorded; records are signed, chained and cannot be changed or deleted. |
| AI assistant | Off by default; receives only aggregate information, never participant rows or pseudonyms. |
| Retention | Each study's data is deleted at the end of its retention period. See Ending a study and retention. |
On the participant's phone
- The app reads only the measurement types the study asks for.
- Session tokens are kept in the phone's secure storage (Keychain on iPhone, Keystore on Android).
- The queue of data waiting to be sent is not included in the phone's backups.
- The participant's name is not sent; data goes to the research team under the participant code.
Sensitive data
Reproductive health and sexual activity data is marked sensitive in the data catalog. Select it only if your ethics approval and participant information cover it explicitly.
Related articles
Can't find what you need?
Our support team can help, from setting up a study to exporting a dataset. Please include your organization code.
Maintenance and backups
The EnaResearch Maintenance section - setup summary and customer code, service health, the data processing service and queue, backups and disk space.
Participant app
What the EnaResearch participant app for iPhone and Android does, what it sends to your research team, what you see in it and how to stop sending data.