Decentralized patient-centric data management for sharing IoT data streams

Abstract

Analytics over data streams from Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become valuable information sources of user data, benefiting both healthcare service providers and patients. Current approaches of connecting IoT devices directly to central cloud architectures come with a number of disadvantages. One of the main disadvantages is that patient health data cannot be easily shared among different healthcare applications or service providers, limitating the full potential of data-driven analysis over healthcare data streams. In this paper, we present a new decentralized and permissionless data management system which empowers patients to securely and selectively share their own personal data among other patients or healthcare service providers. We depart from current decentralized data management approaches that often involve high transaction fees, scalability problems or a high computational overhead that are not acceptable for resource-constrained IoT devices. The contribution of our work lies in coupling the IOTA Tangle technology as auditable and distributed data storage of the patients encrypted time-series IoT data streams with an efficient key management scheme in order to define fine-grained stream-specific access policies. Based on a reference implementation, different experimental tests were made to highlight the feasibility and applicability of our decentralized data management system for end-to-end encrypted IoT data streams.