Distributed, dynamic and trustworthy access control for telehealth systems

Abstract

SummaryWith its ability to “minimize human intervention when generating, exchanging and consuming data,” the Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly deployed in all sectors, in particular in the healthcare sector. With IoT, telehealth has become the new paradigm in healthcare, as it helps keep patients connected with wearable devices and other remote patient monitoring tools in order to help practitioners work more efficiently. However, telehealth implies that patients share their personal and physiological data remotely with the hospital staff, which can put the patient's privacy at risk. Thus, the establishment of access control is mandatory. Therefore, the objective of this article is to achieve a distributed and reliable access control for telehealth systems using smart contract‐enabled blockchain technology. To do so, we propose three different smart contract‐based access control approaches. We evaluate the three propositions and compare them with related work in terms of latency of access‐request response and gas consumption related to contract deployment, function execution and different responses, furthermore, we give a security analysis.