BlockMedCare: A healthcare system based on IoT, Blockchain and IPFS for data management security

Abstract

Nowadays, healthcare is growing rapidly due to the large development of new technologies such as IoT and wearable devices. These devices are widely used to ensure remote patient monitoring. The current implementation is based on a client/server architecture. This raises several challenges regarding security and privacy that make healthcare systems more susceptible to several attacks. Therefore, health data are subject to strict regulatory and security requirements. To overcome these challenges and comply with security regulations, the adoption of a distributed architecture is a necessity. Due to its distributed nature and its security promises, Blockchain has a large interest as a sophisticated technology to solve the security challenges in IoT-based systems. Motivated by these factors, this work proposes BlockMedCare, a secure healthcare system that integrates IoT with Blockchain. The system is designed to support remote patient monitoring, especially when it comes to chronic diseases that require regular monitoring. We took into consideration three main parameters: security, scalability, and processing time. The security is ensured by using the re-encryption proxy combined with Blockchain to store hash data. Smart contracts are used for access control. To ensure Blockchain scalability, an off-chain database based on IPFS is used to store data. To speed up the data storage process, we use an Ethereum Blockchain-based proof of authority. As a use case, we applied the system to diabetes management and showed the execution results based on the system interfaces. The experimental system has demonstrated a good improvement of healthcare systems in terms of security face to the existing methods.