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An Application of blockchain to securely acquire, diagnose and share clinical data through smartphone

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Abstract

Personalization in Health Care services has gained popularity in recent years with the advancement and rapid deployment of wearable devices, smartphones with powerful sensors, Internet of Things, and Telemedicine solutions. It has now become necessary that the patient keeps the ownership of the personal medical data, securely organizes and shares them with the remaining anonymous in the system. In this paper, we propose a blockchain, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and encryption based highly secure network framework responsible for medical data input, transmission, distribution, analysis, and management among patients, doctors, and remote servers resourced with automatic report generation. To make the system highly scalable and reduce the cost of each transaction in Blockchain incurred by cryptocurrency, BigchainDB and IPFS have been utilised which are P2P networks and do not require cryptocurrency for transactions. We have also implemented a divisible token-based payment system where patients transfer ownership of certain amounts of tokens to doctors for getting feedback on reports. Patients can input data, view transactions, generate reports, request for doctor’s feedback, and manage payments. Doctors, registered by the system, may decide to access reports, provide feedback, and check their payment status. Users (Doctor, Patients) will remain completely anonymous to each other and their activity and data will be encrypted and immutable in the proposed system. A smartphone-based application has been developed as a demonstration that can record audio representing phonocardiography (PCG) from patients, send it to the remote server for report generation and to a doctor for receiving feedback while maintaining data integrity. The remote server can also be equipped with AI based automated diagnosis and thus the proposed framework can further be scaled in the near future. We evaluated the performance of our proposed framework through BigchainDB-based Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) testbed that confirms a nearly 20 fold reduction of execution and validation time for 2000 concurrent transactions, and higher throughput compared to the existing literature.

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  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    Hasib Mahmud & Tanzilur Rahman

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  1. Hasib Mahmud
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This article is part of the Topical Collection: Special Issue on Blockchain for Peer-to-Peer Computing Guest Editors: Keping Yu, Chunming Rong, Yang Cao, and Wenjuan Li

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Mahmud, H., Rahman, T. An Application of blockchain to securely acquire, diagnose and share clinical data through smartphone. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 14, 3758–3777 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-021-01210-6

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