Abstract
Within the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain research, there is a growing interest in decentralizing health monitoring systems, to provide improved privacy to patients, without relying on trusted third parties for handling patients’ sensitive health data. With public blockchain deployments being severely limited in their scalability, and inherently having latency in transaction processing, there is room for researching and developing new techniques to leverage the security features of blockchains within healthcare applications. This paper presents a solution for patients to share their biomedical data with their doctors without their data being handled by trusted third party entities. The solution is built on the Ethereum blockchain as a medium for negotiating and record-keeping, along with Tor for delivering data from patients to doctors. To highlight the applicability of the solution in various health monitoring scenarios, we have considered three use-cases, namely cardiac monitoring, sleep apnoea testing, and EEG following epileptic seizures. Following the discussion about the use cases, the paper outlines a security analysis performed on the proposed solution, based on multiple attack scenarios. Finally, the paper presents and discusses a performance evaluation in terms of data delivery time in comparison to existing centralized and decentralized solutions.
Highlights
In 2008, blockchains gained popularity among distributed ledger technologies when the Bitcoin whitepaper was published [1]
We considered the computational overheads on the patient and doctor nodes for participating in the remote healthcare blockchain, as well as the propagation delay involved in delivering health monitoring data over Tor
A blockchain-Internet of Things (IoT) convergence is seen as a potential step forwards towards democratic and decentralized healthcare systems
Summary
In 2008, blockchains gained popularity among distributed ledger technologies when the Bitcoin whitepaper was published [1]. Within the Bitcoin application, the utility of blockchain is to facilitate the exchange of digital tokens among participants in a peer-to-peer network, without the need to place trust in a centralized third party entity. Such transactions have traditionally relied on banks and other mediating third party services. With the growing research interest in integrating blockchains into the IoT, healthcare is one of the most significant industries where a number of suitable use-cases have been identified These include applications in medical record keeping, pharmaceutical supply chains, health insurance, health research analytics and remote health monitoring [8].
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