Chapter 6 - Blockchain for IoT-based medical delivery drones: State of the art, issues, and future prospects

Abstract

The internet of things (IoT) has expanded the reachability of pervasive applications in different domains. Smart healthcare is one such area where IoT-based approaches have been successfully demonstrated in the recent past. However, issues related to the scaling of large ad hoc elements are still a major challenge. Medical delivery drones are a new variant of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to pave a holistic orientation into the smart health service paradigm. Lack of augmentation aware notions has resisted the realization of an actual intervention of IoT-based medical delivery via UAVs. Proper architectural frameworks and models are needed to efficiently integrate IoT with medical delivery drones. However, major security drawbacks should be investigated a priori to imply the health delivery services in coming days. We can use blockchain-centric approaches to fill this gap in the IoT-based medical delivery drone ecosystem. In this chapter, we first present details about drone suppliers and perform a comparative analysis of such drones for medical delivery. Secondly, we present a state of the art on blockchain-assisted, IoT-based, drone-centric, medical delivery. Finally, we depict some key challenges associated with existing drone delivery mechanisms and prescribe future directions. We conclude that drones have huge potential to revolutionize the status of medical delivery with support from the IoT and blockchain platforms. Overall, the medical delivery domain is envisaged to augment existing medical care with enriched security.