Smart Tele-Healthcare using Blockchain and IPFS

Abstract

In day-to-day life, Time and Health are two precious assets to achieve anything by an individual. In sustaining good health, rural communities confront numerous obstacles in receiving healthcare services. According to the statistics, 26.5% of uninsured rural residents delayed receiving necessary healthcare in the past year. At the beginning of 2020, the use of telemedicine services was already booming, but responses to the COVID-19 pandemic sped up this expansion. In rural areas, one must make sure that telehealth services continue to be compensated at the existing pandemic rates in order to provide proper treatment at right moment with patient’s medical history. To solve this issue, the “Smart TeleHealthcare using Blockchain and IPFS ”(STBI) system proposes a secure healthcare solution that merges IoT and Blockchain. The Blockchain network connects the patient and medical team in STBI, and both can communicate with the decentralized storage IPFS. STBI system collects healthcare samples (i.e., which are simulated by sensing temperature using Node MCU board interfacing with LM35 sensor) and displays the health reports (i.e., temperature value) on webpage. The lengthy health reports are kept in IPFS, and the resulting hash value is stored in Blockchain for further reference by doctors. In STBI, the electronic medical data is shared between authorized stakeholders such as patients, doctors and medical team which enhances effective medical treatment collaboratively. The experimental system was incorporated with blockchain and IoT technologies to provide an enhanced secure and transparent healthcare facilities in rural areas.