A Patient Centric Agent Assisted Private Blockchain on Hyperledger Fabric for Managing Remote Patient Monitoring

Abstract

Recently, during the COVID-19 situation, the requirement and importance of tracking patients from a remote location have increased significantly. Most patients now prefer to obtain their doctor's care and check their health status through their mobile phone call, Skype, Facebook Messenger, or other online resources. There is, however, a major concern about the privacy of patients when using online resources. Patients usually choose to keep their information confidential, which should be only accessible to authorized individuals. The most current remote patient monitoring system is organization-centric and patient's privacy and security rely on healthcare providers' mercy. Blockchain technologies have attracted the attention of researchers for designing eHealth applications to provide patients with secure and privacy-preserving health services. Blockchain researchers have recently proposed some models for remote patient monitoring systems. However, most of those researchers have applied public blockchains where health data is available to all participants with the property of data tamper-proof. In this paper, we propose a novel remote patient monitoring model using a decentralized private blockchain to protect patient's privacy and increase the system's efficiency. The private blockchain will be implemented on Hyperledger Fabric where a Patient-centric Agents (PCA) manage patient's data and coordinate authorization to form a secure channel to transmit data to the private blockchain. A hybrid consensus by combining Proof of Integrity (PoI) and Proof of Validity (PoV) is used to protect data privacy and integrity when retrieving data from a blockchain-based cloud database. Finally, the Merkle Tree algorithm was used for data processing and authentication when collecting data and uploading it to a cloud database.