Blockchain for public health care in smart society

Abstract

Blockchain is a new technology that demands more efficient and scalable techniques to incorporate it with business models. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based smart healthcare business model, which keeps customers at the center of business. Our proposed smart healthcare business model can predict customer's status and is able to give rewards according to the business rules set by participating organizations. However, businesses also demand something in return, and in our scenario, we are concerned about data in the wild. Our model fetches “data in the wild” from the Internet of Medical Things. Nevertheless, this model can be applied to any business scenario where a customer reward system exists. Our proposed model focuses more on customers and business while utilizing technology to ease the customer and other parties involved in the business. This fusion makes business more effective as the organization can determine the path of business and make decisions accordingly. Incorporating technologies with existing business models such as the “consumer centric model” makes it easy for businesses to modernize.

Introduction

As Blockchain is gaining more acknowledgement on a daily basis, researchers are focusing on instigating and designing frameworks to embed it within real life applications and scenarios. The general consensus is that the evolution process of Blockchain should be improved while preserving its core properties. These properties include decentralization, transparency, autonomy, immutability, and anonymity. However, along with the development process, security issues are also evolving. Security issues include Majority Attack (51% attack), fork problems, and scaling [Lin and Liao [18]]. According to IBM, Blockchain has the potential to build a versatile and huge trust network, and many business executives want to introduce Blockchain technology to their businesses [IBM [16]]. However, this shift requires attention from researchers to develop new ways for users to interact with Blockchain technology. Jianjun Sun et al. introduced a framework to establish a milestone for solving issues like sharing services in smart cities while maintaining transparency and privacy of Blockchain [Sun et al. [26]Sun, Yan, and Zhang]. Frameworks like these are the building blocks for businesses to accept Blockchain technology in their organizations. However, we are concerned with proposing a business model that can provide an overall framework that is complete for business to adopt easily in a smart way. Therefore, we consider Internet of Things (IoT) for businesses in or proposed model. Terms like smart (cities, home, grid, cars, etc.) and connected living can be associated with IoT. However, this requires analytics, as used in intelligent transportation systems in smart cities [Balasubramaniam et al. [6]Balasubramaniam, Paul, Hong, Seo, and Kim]. With the latest advancements such as 4 G and 5 G, connected living is developing [Agiwal et al. [2]Agiwal, Saxena, and Roy], and it is now in the phase of industrialization — a phase where industry wants to meet its pre-defined standards. This is also shifting the paradigm of communication technology. Integration of LoRaWAN and 4 G/5 G for industrial IoT is another step [Navarro-Ortiz et al. [20]Navarro-Ortiz, Sendra, Ameigeiras, and Lopez-Soler] that helps IoT to work on low power. Maheshwari et al. also contributed to managing IoT devices based on electrical power reliability and dynamic power management [Chen et al. [9]Chen, Ma, and Liu] [Pat [1]. Work like fire detection through IoT [Saeed et al. [25]]aeed, Paul, Rehman, Hong, and Seo] and ideas like “smart buddy” that can collect data and send it to the cloud to analyze human behavior in Social IoT [Paul et al. [21]Paul, Ahmad, Rathore, and Jabbar] are improving understanding of the capability of data generated through IoT devices. This scenario also led to the issue of fetching “data in the wild”, as most data is not reaching businesses because they are not yet ready to adopt new technology. IoT also contributes to urban planning, and this is happening because of technology like Hadoop that can analyze big data in the cloud [Rathore et al. [23]Rathore, Ahmad, Paul, and Rho]. To make it more secure, more localized, and take some burden from cloud, we introduced fog computing in our proposed system. Cisco coined the term fog, and now researchers are aware of its potential. However, fog itself can increase the potential of IoT [Cover [12]]. Fog layer facilitated our proposed system to obtain data directly from IoT devices and analyze it before sending it to the cloud or Blockchain. In this model, we also consider business and their models. This is necessary to understand present real-world work environments. Customer centric models are proven to be efficient in businesses. Not only traditional business but also for e-commerce can get benefit from user centric models. Customer experience and relation is vital for the businesses to run smoothly [Raunaque et al. [24]Raunaque, Imam, and Raja]. Businesses are also finding ways to interact with customers more efficiently and allow collaboration in the creation and innovation process that helps them to fulfill the requirements of customers [Piller et al. [22]Piller, Ihl, and Vossen]. Along with similar technologies, IoT is also helping industries to adopt technology in better ways. Health care is also evolving with the Internet of Medical things (IoMT). The IoMT can also be interpreted as an Internet of Multimedia Things. However, here we are concerned with medical and healthcare systems. Currently, it is relatively difficult to obtain data from the wild, validate it, and process it according to pre-existing business models and use it within business to make vital decisions. To validate data for Blockchain, certain algorithms can be applied, but most of them are related to financial purposes like cryptocurrencies. Proof of stake and proof of work are example of such a validation process. We aim to maintain normality within business environments and to simulate office routine without introducing new rules and regulations to validate our data. We require a new algorithm that can fit within business, and it should be agile to fit in a new environment. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 3, we give a brief introduction to our work. In Section 4, we describe our motivations and present the problem and solution. Section 5 presents the proposed framework and describes the main functionality of the framework and why it is important to look for new techniques to accommodate future explosions of data and security related issues while keeping concepts simple for businesses. Further, we elaborate on the algorithms that are part of the framework to work with network technologies along with Blockchain. Finally, we present discussion and conclude our research.