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Detecting rare diseases often requires data from multiple institutions due to the scarcity of cases at individual hospitals. Centralizing data is not feasible due to privacy, consent, and jurisdictional issues. Federated learning enables model training across hospitals without transferring raw data, but it lacks formal privacy guarantees. Model updates can still leak information, and aggregation servers may compromise privacy if they handle unprotected data. This article presents a conceptual framework combining federated learning, differential privacy, and secure multi-party computation for rare disease detection across 50+ international hospitals. The system addresses data scarcity, regulatory fragmentation, and network heterogeneity. Each hospital trains a local model, applies differential privacy to updates, and shares encrypted updates via an aggregation protocol. Non-colluding servers compute global updates without accessing plaintext data. Differential privacy reduces the impact of individual patient data, while secure multi-party computation ensures privacy at the aggregation layer. These methods enable a privacy-preserving approach to federated learning for rare disease collaboration. The proposed framework enables multi-continental rare disease detection without centralizing patient data, offering a privacy-preserving model for future consortia.

Fall risk in aging populations is a modifiable health concern, with mobility patterns changing over time due to factors like frailty, comorbidities, and medication. Smartwatch accelerometers provide a privacy-sensitive way to monitor gait and movement outside clinical settings. However, federated learning, which supports privacy by keeping sensor data local, faces challenges in aging populations due to concept drift from gradual mobility decline, which can invalidate static models. This article proposes a federated continual learning framework to adaptively maintain fall risk prediction models using smartwatch data. The system includes local models that combine feature extraction with temporal sequence modeling, continual learning to prevent forgetting, and a federated server for privacy-preserving coordination. It aims to support personalized fall risk monitoring, reduce concept drift, and enable scalable deployment in senior care settings, with clinical validation necessary for real-world assessment.