Internet of Things (IoT) devices are capable of allowing for far-reaching access to and evaluation of patient data to monitor health and diagnose from a distance. An electronic healthcare system that checks patient data, prepares medicines and provides financial assistance is necessary. Providing safe data transmission, monitoring, decentralization, preserving patient privacy, and maintaining confidentiality are essential to an electronic healthcare system. In this study, we introduce (SCALHEALTH) which is a blockchain-based scheme of the Hyperledger Fabric consortium. In this study, we use authentication to agree on a common key for data encryption to send data confidentially. Also, sending data through IPFS is decentralized. Non-fungible token (NFT) is used to send patient prescriptions to pharmacies and insurance companies to ensure the authenticity of patient prescriptions. As the system's main body, blockchain creates authorization and validation for all devices and institutions. Also, all metadata in the system is recorded on the blockchain to maintain integrity, transparency, and timely data monitoring. The proposed study uses two types of blockchain: a health blockchain and a financial blockchain. The financial blockchain is for financial transactions and is based on Ethereum. The health blockchain also introduces a mechanism that allows several blockchains to be active in parallel, instead of only one blockchain. The prototype of this mechanism is simulated in two scenarios. In comparison to the normal state, the proposed plan has superior results.
The concept of blockchain has emerged as an effective solution for data-sensitive domains, such as healthcare, financial services, etc., due to its various attributes like immutability, non-repudiation, and availability. Thus, implementation of this technology in various domains rose exponentially; one of such fields is the healthcare supply chain. Managing healthcare supply chain processes effectively is very crucial for the healthcare system. Despite various innovations in the method of treatment methodologies, the healthcare supply chain management system is not up to the mark and lacks eff…
Healthcare blockchains provide an innovative way to store healthcare information, execute healthcare transactions, and build trust for healthcare data sharing and data integration in a decentralized open healthcare network environment. Although the healthcare blockchain technology has attracted broad interests and attention in industry, government and academia, the security and privacy concerns remain the focus of debate when deploying blockchains for information sharing in the healthcare sector from business operation to research collaboration. This paper focuses on the security and privacy r…
Known for its decentralized and tamper-aware properties, blockchain is attractive to enhance the infrastructure of systems that have been constrained by traditionally centralized and vendor-locked environments. Although blockchain has commonly been used as the operational model behind cryptocurrency, it has far more foreseeable utilities in domains like healthcare, where efficient data flow is highly demanded. Particularly, blockchain and related technologies have been touted as foundational technologies for addressing healthcare interoperability challenges, such as promoting effective communi…
The advancement in the healthcare sector is entering into a new era in the form of Health 4.0. The integration of innovative technologies like Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Big Data, Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, and Blockchain with Healthcare services has led to improved performance and efficiency through data-based learning and interconnection of systems. On the other hand, it has also increased complexities and has brought its own share of vulnerabilities due to the heavy influx, sharing, and storage of healthcare data. The protection of the same from cyber-attacks along with privacy p…
With the advent of Bitcoin and blockchain, the growth and adaptation of cryptographic features and capabilities were quickly extended to new and underexplored areas, such as healthcare. Currently, blockchain is being implemented mainly as a mechanism to secure Electronic Health Records (EHRs). However, new studies have shown that this technology can be a powerful tool in empowering patients to control their own health data, as well for enabling a fool-proof health data history and establishing medical responsibility. With the advent of mobile health (m-Health) sustained on service-oriented arc…
Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), a Blockchain-based technology for digital identity management, is a promising concept for handling health data. It could represent a step forward in empowering users, granting them control over their data. This work conducts a systematic literature review to investigate state-of-the-art measures based on SSI and Blockchain technologies for dealing with electronic health records (EHRs), identifying gaps, and determining the key questions for future research. As a result, this review shows a growing interest in Blockchain methods to handle EHRs, but few works consi…
Symbiosis Institute of Technology, Symbiosis International (Deemed University)（共生国际（被视为）大学共生技术学院）；Curtin University（科廷大学）；UCSI University（UCSI大学）；Machine Intelligence Research Laboratories（机器智能研究实验室）
Healthcare systems are increasingly incorporating Artificial Intelligence into their systems, but it is not a solution for all difficulties. AI's extraordinary potential is being held back by challenges such as a lack of medical datasets for training AI models, adversarial attacks, and a lack of trust due to its black box working style. We explored how blockchain technology can improve the reliability and trustworthiness of AI-based healthcare. This paper has conducted a Systematic Literature Review to explore the state-of-the-art research studies conducted in healthcare applications developed…
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have improved many aspects of healthcare and allowed for easier patient management for medical providers. Blockchains have been proposed as a promising solution for supporting Electronic Health Records (EHRs), but have also been linked to scalability concerns about supporting real-world healthcare systems. This paper quantifies the scalability issues and bottlenecks related to current blockchains and puts into perspective the limitations blockchains have with supporting healthcare systems. Particularly we show that well known blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethere…
The application of blockchain technology can be beneficial in the field of healthcare as well as in the fight against the COVID-19 epidemic. In this work, the importance of blockchain is analyzed and it is observed that blockchain technology and the processes associated with it will be utilised in the healthcare systems of the future for data acquisition from sensors, automatic patient monitoring, and secure data storage. This technology substantially simplifies the process of carrying out operations because it can store a substantial quantity of data in a dispersed and secure manner, as well …
There continues to be a recent push to taking the cryptocurrency based ledger system known as Blockchain and applying its techniques to non-financial applications. One of the main areas for application remains Internet of Things (IoT) as we see many areas of improvement as we move into an age of smart cities. In this paper, we examine an initial look at applying the key aspects of Blockchain to a health application network where patients health data can be used to create alerts important to authenticated healthcare providers in a secure and private manner. This paper also presents the benefits…
The healthcare industry has witnessed significant transformations in e-health services where Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are transferred to mobile edge clouds to facilitate healthcare. Many edge cloud-based system designs have been proposed, but some technical challenges still remain, such as low quality of services (QoS), data privacy and system security due to centralized healthcare architectures. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid approach of data offloading and data sharing for healthcare using edge cloud and blockchain. First, an efficient data offloading scheme is proposed whe…
Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University) Varanasi（瓦拉纳西印度理工学院（贝拿勒斯印度教大学））
This paper proposes Federated Learning (FL) based smart healthcare system where Medical Centers (MCs) train the local model using the data collected from patients and send the model weights to the miners in a blockchain-based robust framework without sharing raw data, keeping privacy preservation into deliberation. We formulate an optimization problem by maximizing the utility and minimizing the loss function considering energy consumption and FL process delay of MCs for learning effective models on distributed healthcare data underlying a blockchain-based framework. We propose a solution in t…
Cross-institutional healthcare predictive modeling can accelerate research and facilitate quality improvement initiatives, and thus is important for national healthcare delivery priorities. For example, a model that predicts risk of re-admission for a particular set of patients will be more generalizable if developed with data from multiple institutions. While privacy-protecting methods to build predictive models exist, most are based on a centralized architecture, which presents security and robustness vulnerabilities such as single-point-of-failure (and single-point-of-breach) and accidental…
ConsenSys Health；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学伯曼生物伦理研究所）
We propose a novel architecture for federated learning within healthcare consortia. At the heart of the solution is a unique integration of privacy preserving technologies, built upon native enterprise blockchain components available in the Ethereum ecosystem. We show how the specific characteristics and challenges of healthcare consortia informed our design choices, notably the conception of a new Secure Aggregation protocol assembled with a protected hardware component and an encryption toolkit native to Ethereum. Our architecture also brings in a privacy preserving audit trail that logs eve…
The transparent and decentralized characteristics associated with blockchain can be both appealing and problematic when applied to a healthcare use-case. As health data is highly sensitive, it is also highly regulated to ensure the privacy of patients. At the same time, access to health data and interoperability is in high demand. Regulatory frameworks such as GDPR and HIPAA are, amongst other objectives, meant to contribute to mitigating the risk of privacy violations in health data. Blockchain features can likely improve interoperability and access control to health data, and at the same tim…
The future of healthcare systems is being shaped by incorporating emerged technological innovations to drive new models for patient care. By acquiring, integrating, analyzing, and exchanging medical data at different system levels, new practices can be introduced, offering a radical improvement to healthcare services. This paper presents a novel smart and secure Healthcare system (ssHealth), which, leveraging advances in edge computing and blockchain technologies, permits epidemics discovering, remote monitoring, and fast emergency response. The proposed system also allows for secure medical d…
Integration of Federated Learning and Blockchain in Healthcare: A Tutorial
Montreal Blockchain Lab, University of Montreal（蒙特利尔区块链实验室，蒙特利尔大学）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa（渥太华大学电气与计算机工程学院）
National College of Business Administration and Economics（国家工商经济学院）；Riphah International University（里法哈国际大学）；Skyline University College（天际线大学学院）；Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia（马来西亚国民大学）；Gachon University（加川大学）；Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava（布拉迪斯拉发斯洛伐克理工大学）；Obuda University（欧布达大学）；TU-Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）
In recent years, the global Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) industry has evolved at a tremendous speed. Security and privacy are key concerns on the IoMT, owing to the huge scale and deployment of IoMT networks. Machine learning (ML) and blockchain (BC) technologies have significantly enhanced the capabilities and facilities of healthcare 5.0, spawning a new area known as "Smart Healthcare." By identifying concerns early, a smart healthcare system can help avoid long-term damage. This will enhance the quality of life for patients while reducing their stress and healthcare costs. The IoMT ena…
Patients living in a digitized world can now interact with medical professionals through online services such as chat applications, video conferencing or indirectly through consulting services. These applications need to tackle several fundamental trust issues: 1. Checking and confirming that the person they are interacting with is a real person; 2. Validating that the healthcare professional has competence within the field in question; and 3. Confirming that the healthcare professional has a valid license to practice. In this paper, we present VerifyMed -- the first proof-of-concept platform,…
Technology has evolved over the years, making our lives easier. It has impacted the healthcare sector, increasing the average life expectancy of human beings. Still, there are gaps that remain unaddressed. There is a lack of transparency in the healthcare system, which results in inherent trust problems between patients and hospitals. In the present day, a patient does not know whether he or she will get the proper treatment from the hospital for the fee charged. A patient can claim reimbursement of the medical bill from any insurance company. However, today there is minimal scope for the Insu…
We are experiencing an unprecedented healthcare crisis caused by newly-discovered corona-virus disease (COVID-19). The outbreaks of COVID-19 reveal the frailties of existing healthcare systems. Therefore, the digital transformation of healthcare systems becomes an inevitable trend. During this process, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) plays a crucial role while intrinsic vulnerabilities of security and privacy deter the wide adoption of IoMT. In this article, we present a blockchain-enabled IoMT to address the security and privacy concerns of IoMT systems. We also discuss the solutions br…
Verification of data generated by wearable sensors is increasingly becoming of concern to health service providers and insurance companies. There is a need for a verification framework that various authorities can request a verification service for the local network data of a target IoT device. In this paper, we leverage blockchain as a distributed platform to realize an on-demand verification scheme. This allows authorities to automatically transact with connected devices for witnessing services. A public request is made for witness statements on the data of a target IoT that is transmitted o…
Electronic medical records (EMRs) are critical, highly sensitive private information in healthcare, and need to be frequently shared among peers. Blockchain provides a shared, immutable and transparent history of all the transactions to build applications with trust, accountability and transparency. This provides a unique opportunity to develop a secure and trustable EMR data management and sharing system using blockchain. In this paper, we present our perspectives on blockchain based healthcare data management, in particular, for EMR data sharing between healthcare providers and for research …
Blockchain is an emerging decentralized data collection, sharing and storage technology, which have provided abundant transparent, secure, tamper-proof, secure and robust ledger services for various real-world use cases. Recent years have witnessed notable developments of blockchain technology itself as well as blockchain-adopting applications. Most existing surveys limit the scopes on several particular issues of blockchain or applications, which are hard to depict the general picture of current giant blockchain ecosystem. In this paper, we investigate recent advances of both blockchain techn…
Wearable fitness devices are widely used to track an individual's health and physical activities to improve the quality of health services. These devices sense a considerable amount of sensitive data processed by a centralized third party. While many researchers have thoroughly evaluated privacy issues surrounding wearable fitness trackers, no study has addressed privacy issues in trackers by giving control of the data to the user. Blockchain is an emerging technology with outstanding advantages in resolving consent management privacy concerns. As there are no fully transparent, legally compli…
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply influenced the lifestyle of the general public and the healthcare system of the society. As a promising approach to address the emerging challenges caused by the epidemic of infectious diseases like COVID-19, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) deployed in hospitals, clinics, and healthcare centers can save the diagnosis time and improve the efficiency of medical resources though privacy and security concerns of IoMT stall the wide adoption. In order to tackle the privacy, security, and interoperability issues of IoMT, we propose a framework of bl…
This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a prototype blockchain solution for private and secure individual omics health data management and sharing. This solution is one output of a multidisciplinary project investigating the social, data and technical issues surrounding application of blockchain technology in the context of personalized healthcare research. The project studies potential ethical, legal, social and cognitive constraints of self-sovereign healthcare data management and sharing, and whether such constraints can be addressed through careful user interface design of …
University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Over the years, the popularity and usage of wearable Internet of Things (IoT) devices in several healthcare services are increased. Among the services that benefit from the usage of such devices is predictive analysis, which can improve early diagnosis in e-health. However, due to the limitations of wearable IoT devices, challenges in data privacy, service integrity, and network structure adaptability arose. To address these concerns, we propose a platform using federated learning and private blockchain technology within a fog-IoT network. These technologies have privacy-preserving features se…
Multi-Continental Healthcare Modelling Using Blockchain-Enabled Federated Learning
School of Computing, Newcastle University（新castle大学计算机学院）；Department of Computing, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院计算机系）；Institute of Health Informatics, University College London（伦敦大学学院健康信息学研究所）；Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University（上海智能自主系统研究所，同济大学）；College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学电子与信息工程学院）；University College London Hospital（伦敦大学学院医院）
Medical data sharing needs to be done with the utmost respect for privacy and security. It contains intimate data of the patient and any access to it must be highly regulated. With the emergence of vertical solutions in healthcare institutions, interoperability across organisations has been hindered. The authors of this paper propose a blockchain based medical-data sharing solution, utilising Hyperledger Fabric to regulate access to medical data, and using the InterPlanatory File System for its storage. We believe that the combination of these two distributed solutions can enable patients to a…
Blockchain technology has piqued the interest of businesses of all types, while consistently improving and adapting to developers and business owners requirements. Therefore, several blockchain platforms have emerged, making it challenging to select a suitable one for a specific type of business. This paper presents a classification of over one hundred blockchain platforms. We develop smart contracts for detecting healthcare insurance frauds using two blockchain platforms selected based on our proposed decision-making map approach for the selection of the top two suitable platforms for healthc…
IoT has enabled the rapid growth of smart remote healthcare applications. These IoT-based remote healthcare applications deliver fast and preventive medical services to patients at risk or with chronic diseases. However, ensuring data security and patient privacy while exchanging sensitive medical data among medical IoT devices is still a significant concern in remote healthcare applications. Altered or corrupted medical data may cause wrong treatment and create grave health issues for patients. Moreover, current remote medical applications' efficiency and response time need to be addressed an…
