Hitching Medical IoT Devices to Blockchain for Personal Health Information Management

Abstract

Ubiquitous availability of Internet connectivity IoT enabled medical devices and advances in electronic health records have given rise to massive amounts of personal health data. However, being sensitive in nature, there are stringent legal requirements related to the sharing and processing of personal health data. There is a growing trend of using Personal Information Management System (PIMS) to gather, store, manage, and provide secure and privacy-aware access to personal data. Recently, blockchain technology has emerged as a lucrative option for personal health information management. In this chapter, we propose a layered architecture for a blockchain-based PIMS for managing data originating from medical IoT devices. The proposed architecture has four layers as follows: (1) A blockchain layer that provides functionality to implement and host blockchain database; (2) An IoT device layer that consists of electronic data devices such as health watch, weighing scale, and blood pressure measurement sensors; (3) An application layer that collects data from the health devices and displays consolidated data view to the user; and (4) An adapter layer that has a responsibility of interfacing an application layer with the blockchain layer. The proposed architecture is extensible to accommodate additional electronic devices and services and it is also language and platform agnostic. We are currently building a Proof of Concept (PoC) prototype for validating proposed architecture using Hyperledger Fabric platform.