Abstract
The top priority of today’s healthcare system is delivering medicine directly from the manufacturer to end-user. The pharmaceutical supply chain involves some level of commingling of a collection of stakeholders such as distributors, manufacturers, wholesalers, and customers. The biggest challenge associated with this supply chain is temperature monitoring as well as counterfeit drug prevention. Many drugs and vaccines remain viable within a specific range of temperatures. If exposed beyond this temperature range, the medicine no longer works as intended. In this paper, an Internet of Things (IoT) sensor-based blockchain framework is proposed that tracks and traces drugs as they pass slowly through the entire supply chain. On the one hand, these new technologies of blockchain and IoT sensors play an essential role in supply chain management. On the other hand, they also pose new challenges of security for resource-constrained IoT devices and blockchain scalability issues to handle this IoT sensor-based information. In this paper, our primary focus is on improving classic blockchain systems to make it suitable for IoT based supply chain management, and as a secondary focus, applying these new promising technologies to enable a viable smart healthcare ecosystem through a drug supply chain.
Highlights
Transportation of pharmaceuticals from manufacturer to patient follows a stringent supply chain
An Internet of Things (IoT) sensor-based blockchain framework is proposed that tracks and traces drugs as they pass slowly through the entire supply chain
These new technologies of blockchain and IoT sensors play an essential role in supply chain management
Summary
Transportation of pharmaceuticals (drugs, vaccines, supplies) from manufacturer to patient follows a stringent supply chain. There are quite a few consensus algorithms available for blockchain that support high throughput; they require extremely high-performance for the network. Collecting encrypted data from resource-constrained devices, for example, the QR code scanner, is a major issue. Many applications like sensor networks or RFID are implemented on devices with very limited capabilities, and they require lightweight encryption. Many well-known standard algorithms, for example, AES, do not stand up to the basic requirements of constrained devices This includes the need for minimal cost hardware implementation, minimal power usage, and minimal latency. These algorithms are usually smaller and faster for IoT based software implementation Another major issue in need of addressing is the security of sensor devices with lightweight digital signature schemes.
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