A Collateral Sensor Data Sharing Framework for Decentralized Healthcare Systems

Abstract

Healthcare is one of the largest domains across the globe both in terms of employment and income generation. It is continuously evolving and exploiting new technological dimensions to incorporate innovations for providing universal health coverage. Sharing of data collected by various sensors deployed at the patient’s end is a growing solicitude in healthcare as the privacy of the personal healthcare data is of paramount importance. In this paper, a blockchain based healthcare framework is proposed to address the problems related to the sensor-based patient vital body parameters collection, monitoring, secured data storage and sharing among different stakeholders. This framework uses Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices interfaced with MAX30205 (human body temperature), and a blood pressure including heart-rate measuring device to collect the patient vital parameters. A Markov state chain is modeled to monitor the patient medical states through various phases during the treatment and monitoring process. Application layer protocols MQTT, CoAP, and AMQP are evaluated for latency and packet loss during data transfers. Ethereum permissioned blockchain is used to deploy the proposed model. Smart contracts provide access control only to authorized users. A comparative analysis is provided in the end to highlight the merits of the proposed model over the existing similar methods. Due to the parallelism and use of blockchain, the system reports 80% improvement in terms of nodes and transaction scalability compared to the existing systems.