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eHealthChain—a blockchain-based personal health information management system

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Abstract

Medical IoT devices that use miniature sensors to collect patient’s bio-signals and connected medical applications are playing a crucial role in providing pervasive and personalized healthcare. This technological improvement has also created opportunities for the better management of personal health information. The Personal Health Information Management System (PHIMS) supports activities such as acquisition, storage, organization, integration, and privacy-sensitive retrieval of consumer’s health information. For usability and wide acceptance, the PHIMS should follow the design principles that guarantee privacy-aware health information sharing, individual information control, integration of information obtained from multiple medical IoT devices, health information security, and flexibility. Recently, blockchain technology has emerged as a lucrative option for the management of personal health information. In this paper, we propose eHealthChain—a blockchain-based PHIMS for managing health data originating from medical IoT devices and connected applications. The eHealthChain architecture consists of four layers, which are a blockchain layer for hosting a blockchain database, an IoT device layer for obtaining personal health data, an application layer for facilitating health data sharing, and an adapter layer, which interfaces the blockchain layer with an application layer. Compared to existing systems, eHealthChain provides complete control to the user in terms of personal health data acquisition, sharing, and self-management. We also present a detailed implementation of a Proof of Concept (PoC) prototype of eHealthChain system built using Hyperledger Fabric platform.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, State University of New York, Korea, Incheon, South Korea

    Pravin Pawar

  2. Department of Business Analytics and Technology Management, Towson University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Neeraj Parolia

  3. Softlabs Technologies and Developments Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, India

    Sameer Shinde

  4. Chair for Applied Software Engineering, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Thierry Oscar Edoh

  5. Department of Technology Studies, Endicott College of International Studies, Daejeon, South Korea

    Madhusudan Singh

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  1. Pravin Pawar
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Pawar, P., Parolia, N., Shinde, S. et al. eHealthChain—a blockchain-based personal health information management system. Ann. Telecommun. 77, 33–45 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-021-00868-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-021-00868-6

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