A Decentralized Patient Agent Controlled Blockchain for Remote Patient Monitoring

Abstract

Blockchain emerging for healthcare provides a secure, decentralized and patient driven record management system. However, the storage of data generated from IoT devices in remote patient management applications requires a fast consensus mechanism. In this paper, we propose a lightweight consensus mechanism and a decentralized patient software agent to control a remote patient monitoring (RPM) system. The decentralized RPM architecture includes devices at three levels; 1) Body Area Sensor Network- medical sensors typically on or in patient's body transmitting data to a Smartphone, 2) Fog/Edge, and 3) Cloud. We propose that a Patient Agent(PA) software replicated on the Smartphone, Fog and Cloud servers processes medical data to ensure reliable, secure and private communication. Performance analysis has been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Blockchain leveraged, distributed Patient Agent controlled remote patient monitoring system.