TY - JOUR
T1 - Blockchain for IoT-Based Healthcare
T2 - Background, Consensus, Platforms, and Use Cases
AU - Ray, Partha Pratim
AU - Dash, DInesh
AU - Salah, Khaled
AU - Kumar, Neeraj
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2007-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2021/3
Y1 - 2021/3
N2 - Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technologies are being heavily exploited and used in may domains, especially for e-healthcare. In healthcare, IoT devices have the ability to provide real-time sensory data from patients to be processed and analyzed. Collected IoT data are subjected to centralized computation, processing, and storage. Such centralization can be problematic, as it can be a single point of failure, mistrust, data manipulation and tampering, and privacy evasion. Blockchain can solve such serious problems by providing decentralized computation and storage for IoT data. Therefore, the integration IoT and blockchain technologies can become a reasonable choice for the design of a decentralized IoT-based e-healthcare systems. In this article, first, we give a brief background on blockchain. Second, popular consensus algorithms used in blockchain are discussed in the context of e-health. Third, blockchain platforms are reviewed for their appropriateness in IoT-based e-healthcare. Finally, few use cases are methodologically given to show how key features of the IoT and blockchain can be leveraged to support healthcare services and ecosystems. We also propose a data-flow architecture that combines the IoT with blockchain, called IoBHealth, that can be used for storing, accessing, and managing of e-healthcare data.
AB - Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technologies are being heavily exploited and used in may domains, especially for e-healthcare. In healthcare, IoT devices have the ability to provide real-time sensory data from patients to be processed and analyzed. Collected IoT data are subjected to centralized computation, processing, and storage. Such centralization can be problematic, as it can be a single point of failure, mistrust, data manipulation and tampering, and privacy evasion. Blockchain can solve such serious problems by providing decentralized computation and storage for IoT data. Therefore, the integration IoT and blockchain technologies can become a reasonable choice for the design of a decentralized IoT-based e-healthcare systems. In this article, first, we give a brief background on blockchain. Second, popular consensus algorithms used in blockchain are discussed in the context of e-health. Third, blockchain platforms are reviewed for their appropriateness in IoT-based e-healthcare. Finally, few use cases are methodologically given to show how key features of the IoT and blockchain can be leveraged to support healthcare services and ecosystems. We also propose a data-flow architecture that combines the IoT with blockchain, called IoBHealth, that can be used for storing, accessing, and managing of e-healthcare data.
KW - Blockchain
KW - e-health
KW - healthcare
KW - Internet of Things (IoT)
KW - IoT data
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85102745815&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/JSYST.2020.2963840
DO - 10.1109/JSYST.2020.2963840
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85102745815
SN - 1932-8184
VL - 15
SP - 85
EP - 94
JO - IEEE Systems Journal
JF - IEEE Systems Journal
IS - 1
M1 - 8964444
ER -