Abstract
By law, schools are required to protect the well-being of students against problems such as on-campus bullying and physical abuse. In the UK, a report by the Office for Education (OfE) showed 17% of young people had been bullied during 2017–2018. This problem continues to prevail with consequences including depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and eating disorders. Additionally, recent evidence suggests this type of victimisation could intensify existing health complications. This study investigates the opportunities provided by Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) data towards next-generation safeguarding. A new model is developed based on blockchain technology to enable real-time intervention triggered by IoMT data that can be used to detect stressful events, e.g., when bullying takes place. The model utilises private permissioned blockchain to manage IoMT data to achieve quicker and better decision-making while revolutionising aspects related to compliance, double-entry, confidentiality, and privacy. The feasibility of the model and the interaction between the sensors and the blockchain was simulated. To facilitate a close approximation of an actual IoMT environment, we clustered and decomposed existing medical sensors to their attributes, including their function, for a variety of scenarios. Then, we demonstrated the performance and capabilities of the emulator under different loads of sensor-generated data. We argue to the suitability of this emulator for schools and medical centres to conduct feasibility studies to address sensor data with disruptive data processing and management technologies.
Highlights
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.license.Primary and secondary education students spend about a third of their life attending school, which suggests that the school environment impacts significantly on their lives.schools are expected to be places of promoting emotional well-being, and where early signs of changes to students’ behaviour and of mental distress can be spotted [1].Schools are well placed to perform an essential role to safeguard children
All the data stored in the transactions will be replicated on each peer and cannot be removed, directly resulting from the immutability property of the blockchain. To tackle this scalability issue, we considered the solution of storing data off-chain in additional virtual machine (VM) storage, which contains a network of nodes implementing an InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)
The testbed included virtual machines hosted in Amazon AWS EC2 (Amazon, Seattle, WA, USA), each equipped with 2 vCPU, 8 Gb of RAM, and 30 Gb of Solid-State Drive (SSD) storage
Summary
Schools are well placed to perform an essential role to safeguard children They are expected to develop robust practices to identify and act on signs of abuse (and neglect), have a good vetting process in place for adults working with children, and train members of staff to keep their knowledge up to date on regulations and safeguarding policy. Another aspect is to establish trust with children to feel confident to seek advice and report to members of the team should they have a worry. The reported impact was severe, such as poor general health, physical health problems (headache, migraine, stomach ache, tinnitus, musculoskeletal pain), mental health problems (insomnia, anxiety, worry, depression), and self-injurious behaviour [13]
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