The top priority of today's healthcare system is delivering medicine directly from the manufacturer to end-user. The pharmaceutical supply chain involves some level of commingling of a collection of stakeholders such as distributors, manufacturers, wholesalers, and customers. The biggest challenge associated with this supply chain is temperature monitoring as well as counterfeit drug prevention. Many drugs and vaccines remain viable within a specific range of temperatures. If exposed beyond this temperature range, the medicine no longer works as intended. In this paper, an Internet of Things (IoT) sensor-based blockchain framework is proposed that tracks and traces drugs as they pass slowly through the entire supply chain. On the one hand, these new technologies of blockchain and IoT sensors play an essential role in supply chain management. On the other hand, they also pose new challenges of security for resource-constrained IoT devices and blockchain scalability issues to handle this IoT sensor-based information. In this paper, our primary focus is on improving classic blockchain systems to make it suitable for IoT based supply chain management, and as a secondary focus, applying these new promising technologies to enable a viable smart healthcare ecosystem through a drug supply chain.

/pdf/internet-of-things-based-blockchain-for-temperature-4wltqhzrpo.pdf

Internet of Things Based Blockchain for Temperature Monitoring and Counterfeit Pharmaceutical Prevention

Network slicing is one of the fundamental tenets of Fifth Generation (5G)/Sixth Generation (6G) networks. Deploying slices requires end-to-end (E2E) control of services and the underlying resources in a network substrate featuring an increasing number of stakeholders. Beyond the technical difficulties this entails, there is a long list of administrative negotiations among parties that do not necessarily trust each other, which often requires costly manual processes, including the legal construction of neutral entities. In this context, Blockchain comes to the rescue by bringing its decentralized yet immutable and auditable lemdger, which has a high potential in the telco arena. In this sense, it may help to automate some of the above costly processes. There have been some proposals in this direction that are applied to various problems among different stakeholders. This paper aims at structuring this field of knowledge by, first, providing introductions to network slicing and blockchain technologies. Then, state-of-the-art is presented through a global architecture that aggregates the various proposals into a coherent whole while showing the motivation behind applying Blockchain and smart contracts to network slicing. And finally, some limitations of current work, future challenges and research directions are also presented.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielx7/6287639/9668973/09712294.pdf

Distributed Ledger Technologies For Network Slicing: A Survey

Network slicing is one of the fundamental tenets of Fifth Generation (5G)/Sixth Generation (6G) networks. Deploying slices requires end-to-end (E2E) control of services and the underlying resources in a network substrate featuring an increasing number of stakeholders. Beyond the technical difficulties this entails, there is a long list of administrative negotiations among parties that do not necessarily trust each other, which often requires costly manual processes, including the legal construction of neutral entities. In this context, Blockchain comes to the rescue by bringing its decentralized yet immutable and auditable lemdger, which has a high potential in the telco arena. In this sense, it may help to automate some of the above costly processes. There have been some proposals in this direction that are applied to various problems among different stakeholders. This paper aims at structuring this field of knowledge by, first, providing introductions to network slicing and blockchain technologies. Then, state-of-the-art is presented through a global architecture that aggregates the various proposals into a coherent whole while showing the motivation behind applying Blockchain and smart contracts to network slicing. And finally, some limitations of current work, future challenges and research directions are also presented. 

Distributed Ledger Technologies for Network Slicing: A Survey

Digital intervention to reduce counterfeit and falsified medicines: A systematic review and future research agenda

With the rising competition among pharmaceutical companies, the current drug supply chain market has become more competitive with high-quality product segments. The rapid growth of internet pharmacies has made it more difficult to standardize drug safety throughout in complex distributed supply chain networks. There is a high chance of introducing counterfeit drugs which are almost the same as the original pharmaceuticals. Due to the lack of transparency the possibility of tampering with drugs in the current manual and web-based pharmaceutical systems is extremely high. Throughout the past recent years, these counterfeit drugs were recognized as the one of major worldwide problems. This situation is worse in developing countries. The unavailability of verifying the legitimacy of drug suppliers and poor mechanisms to trace the drugs were identified as critical points that need to be resolved. SUPPLYDECK comes as a solution for the critical scenario mentioned. This solution addresses the above problems using blockchain technology, as a distributed digital ledger that ensures transparency, traceability, and security. This can show promise for solving some global supply chain management problems using smart contracts and user authentication along with IoT technology and machine learning concepts that are critically examined with this potential application. 

SUPPLYDECK – A Blockchain-Based Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Management

The goal of this project is to find whether a given medicine is fake or original using blockchain technology. Blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but also has the potential to disrupt other markets. It removes the need for trusted intermediaries, can facilitate faster transactions and add more transparency. A medical product is counterfeit when there is false representation in relation to its identity or source. In the case of medicines, the implications are more severe. This technology stops the entry of fake drugs into the supply chain, mainly the part between the manufacturer and consumer. The technology uses digital signature where each block gets a unique crypto id. This digital signature is provided for each block and it gives a strong control of ownership.

Sorjeeta Gupta

Papers

Anti-Counterfeit on Medicine Detection Using Blockchain Technology