COVID-19 Applications

Abstract

COVID-19 tracking tools or contact-tracing apps are developed by different countries to protect people from the pandemic situation. There are various technologies that can be used in this digital world to handle the patients in the lockdown period. Blockchain technology is one of the important techniques used in the medical field to maintain the patient’s medical records globally and for drug analysis etc. Blockchain is a public distributed ledger or document that is decentralized across many nodes. The public ledger records all the transactions, where the users in the blockchain network gets a copy of those transactions. This technology is used to track all the transactions in a secured and transparent manner. The patient records are also updated from diagnosis to current status. Here the records are shared but the privacy of a patient is maintained because the patient details are distributed as a hash value. These distributed records are immutable so nobody can change or corrupt the patient details in the blockchain because they can be easily identified. During an emergency, doctors can easily gather the health issues of a patient such as diabetes, blood pressure etc., from this public ledger, without any enquiry. Moreover, the doctor can track the previous medication details. This technology is also used in supply chain management of COVID drugs where the consumer can track from the production to dispatch, for identifying the fake medicine as well as anyone can gather the drug details. If any middlemen change the expiry date and price details it can be easily identified with the help of smart contracts. With this technology, Artificial Intelligence also plays a vital role in serving remote patients. Machine learning models are built by analyzing a massive amount of data. By using the distributed ledger, the data scientist can build the updated models continually using machine learning algorithms. The fusion of blockchain technology and machine learning models improves the accuracy of predictions in the health-care industry. This chapter describes the usage of blockchain technology with machine learning algorithms for serving the people.