Modern healthcare systems are characterized as being highly complex and costly. However, this can be reduced through improved health record management, utilization of insurance agencies, and blockchain technology. Blockchain was first introduced to provide distributed records of money-related exchanges that were not dependent on centralized authorities or financial institutions. Breakthroughs in blockchain technology have led to improved transactions involving medical records, insurance billing, and smart contracts, enabling permanent access to and security of data, as well as providing a distributed database of transactions. One significant advantage of using blockchain technology in the healthcare industry is that it can reform the interoperability of healthcare databases, providing increased access to patient medical records, device tracking, prescription databases, and hospital assets, including the complete life cycle of a device within the blockchain infrastructure. Access to patients’ medical histories is essential to correctly prescribe medication, with blockchain being able to dramatically enhance the healthcare services framework. In this paper, several solutions for improving current limitations in healthcare systems using blockchain technology are explored, including frameworks and tools to measure the performance of such systems, e.g., Hyperledger Fabric, Composer, Docker Container, Hyperledger Caliper, and the Wireshark capture engine. Further, this paper proposes an Access Control Policy Algorithm for improving data accessibility between healthcare providers, assisting in the simulation of environments to implement the Hyperledger-based eletronic healthcare record (EHR) sharing system that uses the concept of a chaincode. Performance metrics in blockchain networks, such as latency, throughput, Round Trip Time (RTT). have also been optimized for achieving enhanced results. Compared to traditional EHR systems, which use client-server architecture, the proposed system uses blockchain for improving efficiency and security.

Blockchain-based electronic healthcare record system for healthcare 4.0 applications

The impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) on the advancement of the healthcare industry is immense. The ushering of the Medicine 4.0 has resulted in an increased effort to develop platforms, both at the hardware level as well as the underlying software level. This vision has led to the development of Healthcare IoT (H-IoT) systems. The basic enabling technologies include the communication systems between the sensing nodes and the processors; and the processing algorithms for generating an output from the data collected by the sensors. However, at present, these enabling technologies are also supported by several new technologies. The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed the H-IoT systems at almost every level. The fog/edge paradigm is bringing the computing power close to the deployed network and hence mitigating many challenges in the process. While the big data allows handling an enormous amount of data. Additionally, the Software Defined Networks (SDNs) bring flexibility to the system while the blockchains are finding the most novel use cases in H-IoT systems. The Internet of Nano Things (IoNT) and Tactile Internet (TI) are driving the innovation in the H-IoT applications. This paper delves into the ways these technologies are transforming the H-IoT systems and also identifies the future course for improving the Quality of Service (QoS) using these new technologies.

The Future of Healthcare Internet of Things: A Survey of Emerging Technologies

Enabling technologies for fog computing in healthcare IoT systems

Blockchain for 5G-enabled IoT for industrial automation: A systematic review, solutions, and challenges

Due to the proliferation of ICT during the last few decades, there is an exponential increase in the usage of various smart applications such as smart farming, smart healthcare, supply-chain & logistics, business, tourism and hospitality, energy management etc. However, for all the aforementioned applications, security and privacy are major concerns keeping in view of the usage of the open channel, i.e., Internet for data transfer. Although many security solutions and standards have been proposed over the years to enhance the security levels of aforementioned smart applications, but the existing solutions are either based upon the centralized architecture (having single point of failure) or having high computation and communication costs. Moreover, most of the existing security solutions have focussed only on few aspects and fail to address scalability, robustness, data storage, network latency, auditability, immutability, and traceability. To handle the aforementioned issues, blockchain technology can be one of the solutions. Motivated from these facts, in this paper, we present a systematic review of various blockchain-based solutions and their applicability in various Industry 4.0-based applications. Our contributions in this paper are in four fold. Firstly, we explored the current state-of-the-art solutions in the blockchain technology for the smart applications. Then, we illustrated the reference architecture used for the blockchain applicability in various Industry 4.0 applications. Then, merits and demerits of the traditional security solutions are also discussed in comparison to their countermeasures. Finally, we provided a comparison of existing blockchain-based security solutions using various parameters to provide deep insights to the readers about its applicability in various applications.

Blockchain for Industry 4.0: A Comprehensive Review

In the present era of smart cities and homes, the private information of the patients such as their names, address, and disease is being breached on a regular basis, which indirectly related to the security of electronic health records (EHRs). The existing state-of-the-art schemes handling the security of EHRs have resulted in data being generally inaccessible to patients. These schemes struggle in providing the efficient balance between the data privacy, need for patients, and providers to regularly interact with data. Blockchain technology resolves the aforementioned issues because it shares the data in a decentralized and transactional fashion. This can be leveraged in the healthcare sector to maintain the balance between privacy and accessibility of EHRs. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-based framework for efficient storage and maintenance of EHRs. This further provides the secure and efficient access to medical data by patients, providers, and third parties, while preserving the patient private information. The goals of this paper are to analyze how our proposed framework fulfills the needs of patients, providers, and third parties, and to understand how the framework maintains the privacy and security concerns in the healthcare 4.0.

BHEEM: A Blockchain-Based Framework for Securing Electronic Health Records

From the last few years, Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have attracted a lot of attention from both academia and industry due to an increase in real-time data capturing and processing for patient monitoring. This has become possible due to the technological advancements in which high computing and communication facilities are available for most of the modern handheld devices. In this environment, computing resources are available close to the proximity of the end users using the most popular technology called as Fog computing (devices used in the fog computing are called as fog devices). Most of the solutions reported in the literature for this purpose have used the traditional cloud-based infrastructure in which there may occur a long delay for getting the response even for data which is not of very huge amount which may cause a performance degradation for most of the implemented solutions (such as for treatment of neurological diseases where a real-time monitoring is required) in this environment. Hence, to cope up these issues, in this paper, we proposed a fog computing based patient monitoring system for ambient assisted living (FAAL). Data traces of the movement of the patients (for neurological diseases) are collected using sensor nodes using body area networks (BANs) and are passed using the fog gateways. To reduce the load on the communication infrastructure, an efficient clustering algorithm for data transmission is also presented in the paper. Performance of the proposed solution has been evaluated using the parameters such as-latency, and data overloading. Results obtained clearly show the superior performance of the proposed scheme as compared to the non-fog computing based environment.

FAAL: Fog computing-based patient monitoring system for ambient assisted living

Mobile medicine and health care have been adopted on a very large scale with support from the influx of medical devices and increased usability of remote health services. These are combined with an approachable interest of the patients and a readily approachable conscience about their healthcare. This leads to a huge set of medical data. These data sets require secure transfer, archival and access. In this study, we have proposed an efficient approach to preserve the identity and also protect the privacy of clinical data using highly effective encryption scheme. Moreover, we have also discussed an authorization framework using access of varying degrees. Medical records are often accessed by various entities with varying degrees of authorization. In this study, we have implemented the AT&T scheme for managing the access control mechanism of patients data. Further, encryption is undertaken using ARCANA, that provides hierarchically satisfied access to various data resources. It utilizes the XACML access model to formulate the access control framework. The primary reason for using this model is the regulation to access the data through AT&T based on XACML policies. In addition to this, the encrypting of medical data using various authorization techniques have been required for the proper data access regulation. Which may impact trust of the users in the e-health paradigm and in turn increase the large-scale usability.

Ensuring Privacy and Security in E- Health Records

A systematic review on security issues in vehicular ad hoc network

Nowadays, many people are facing the problem of arthritis. Regular monitoring and consultation of joint health from a specialist can help patients with this chronicle disease. The ratio of orthopedic doctors to patients with arthritis is low, worldwide. Use of smart devices can support the healthcare industry a lot. Motivated by these facts, here we propose an architecture to track the hand movements of the patient. For regular monitoring of patients with arthritis, fog and cloud gateways for real-time response generation are used. Thread protocol and Bayesian network classifier have been included in the proposed architecture to achieve reliable communication and anomaly detection, respectively. A dataset of 431 patients with arthritis is taken in real time and simulated on OMNet++ simulator. Observations show that the packet delivery ratio is improved by 15–20%, the response time is reduced by 20–30%, and the packet delivery rate is improved by 25–35%, in comparison to not using the fog and thread protocol.

Jayneel Vora

Papers

BHEEM: A Blockchain-Based Framework for Securing Electronic Health Records

FAAL: Fog computing-based patient monitoring system for ambient assisted living

Ensuring Privacy and Security in E- Health Records

A systematic review on security issues in vehicular ad hoc network

Human Arthritis Analysis in Fog Computing Environment Using Bayesian Network Classifier and Thread Protocol