Accelerating Health Data Sharing: A Solution Based on the Internet of Things and Distributed Ledger Technologies

Abstract

Background Huge amounts of health-related data are generated every moment with the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable technologies. These big health data contain great value and can bring benefit to all stakeholders in the health care ecosystem. Currently, most of these data are siloed and fragmented in different health care systems or public and private databases. It prevents the fulfillment of intelligent health care inspired by these big data. Security and privacy concerns and the lack of ensured authenticity trails of data bring even more obstacles to health data sharing. With a decentralized and consensus-driven nature, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) provide reliable solutions such as blockchain, Ethereum, and IOTA Tangle to facilitate the health care data sharing. Objective This study aimed to develop a health-related data sharing system by integrating IoT and DLT to enable secure, fee-less, tamper-resistant, highly-scalable, and granularly-controllable health data exchange, as well as build a prototype and conduct experiments to verify the feasibility of the proposed solution. Methods The health-related data are generated by 2 types of IoT devices: wearable devices and stationary air quality sensors. The data sharing mechanism is enabled by IOTA’s distributed ledger, the Tangle, which is a directed acyclic graph. Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) is adopted to facilitate data communications among different parties. Merkle Hash Tree is used for data encryption and verification. Results A prototype system was built according to the proposed solution. It uses a smartwatch and multiple air sensors as the sensing layer; a smartphone and a single-board computer (Raspberry Pi) as the gateway; and a local server for data publishing. The prototype was applied to the remote diagnosis of tremor disease. The results proved that the solution could enable costless data integrity and flexible access management during data sharing. Conclusions DLT integrated with IoT technologies could greatly improve the health-related data sharing. The proposed solution based on IOTA Tangle and MAM could overcome many challenges faced by other traditional blockchain-based solutions in terms of cost, efficiency, scalability, and flexibility in data access management. This study also showed the possibility of fully decentralized health data sharing by replacing the local server with edge computing devices.

Enhancing Healthcare Information Sharing with Blockchain Technology

“…IoT devices and wearables generate huge amounts of health-related data [14] Zheng et al go on to say that distributed ledger technologies like blockchain can improve health-related data sharing greatly. They also add that the benefit of sharing this data can aid stakeholders from patients and device users to companies and researchers and can contribute to the public health care system overall [14]. This data sharing can lead to predictive diagnostics, prevention of expensive tests, and fewer costly procedures [11].…”

“…While blockchain can hold significant promise, there are also some challenges to overcome. Zheng et al note that blockchain has problems such as cost, scalability, efficiency and data management flexibility [14]. They go on to note that transaction fees and centralization pose a risk, as does the possibility of a quantum computer attack [14].…”

“…Zheng et al note that blockchain has problems such as cost, scalability, efficiency and data management flexibility [14]. They go on to note that transaction fees and centralization pose a risk, as does the possibility of a quantum computer attack [14]. Traditional blockchains, such as Bitcoin's, are inefficient and lack scalability with the Bitcoin network only able to process five transactions per second [14].…”

Survey of distributed ledger technology integration challenges

“…В этой статье основное внимание уделяется новым и более широким техническим проблемам, связанным с решениями безопасности и работы серверной платформы на основе DLT для устройств и приложений IoT. В работе [5] также рассматриваются методы взаимодействия интернета вещей и распределенного реестра. Авторы сосредоточились на аспектах связи, представляя архитектуру распределенных доверительных сетей на основе DLT, и предложили новую классификацию для упрощения синхронизации DLT в классических сетях.…”

Healthy Operator 4.0: A Human Cyber–Physical System Architecture for Smart Workplaces

“…The continuous technological innovations in the domains of information technology (IT), the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI), among others, have significantly changed production systems [1][2][3]. Recent advances of these technologies have enabled a systematical implementation of cyber-physical systems (CPS) in manufacturing, which has significantly improved the efficiency of production systems and made them perform more resiliently and collaboratively.…”