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. 2019 Jun 6;21(6):e13583.
doi: 10.2196/13583.

Accelerating Health Data Sharing: A Solution Based on the Internet of Things and Distributed Ledger Technologies

Xiaochen Zheng  1 , Shengjing Sun  1 , Raghava Rao Mukkamala  2   3 , Ravi Vatrapu  2   3 , Joaquín Ordieres-Meré #  1
Affiliations

Accelerating Health Data Sharing: A Solution Based on the Internet of Things and Distributed Ledger Technologies

Xiaochen Zheng et al. J Med Internet Res. .

Abstract

Background: Huge amounts of health-related data are generated every moment with the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable technologies. These big health data contain great value and can bring benefit to all stakeholders in the health care ecosystem. Currently, most of these data are siloed and fragmented in different health care systems or public and private databases. It prevents the fulfillment of intelligent health care inspired by these big data. Security and privacy concerns and the lack of ensured authenticity trails of data bring even more obstacles to health data sharing. With a decentralized and consensus-driven nature, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) provide reliable solutions such as blockchain, Ethereum, and IOTA Tangle to facilitate the health care data sharing.

Objective: This study aimed to develop a health-related data sharing system by integrating IoT and DLT to enable secure, fee-less, tamper-resistant, highly-scalable, and granularly-controllable health data exchange, as well as build a prototype and conduct experiments to verify the feasibility of the proposed solution.

Methods: The health-related data are generated by 2 types of IoT devices: wearable devices and stationary air quality sensors. The data sharing mechanism is enabled by IOTA's distributed ledger, the Tangle, which is a directed acyclic graph. Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) is adopted to facilitate data communications among different parties. Merkle Hash Tree is used for data encryption and verification.

Results: A prototype system was built according to the proposed solution. It uses a smartwatch and multiple air sensors as the sensing layer; a smartphone and a single-board computer (Raspberry Pi) as the gateway; and a local server for data publishing. The prototype was applied to the remote diagnosis of tremor disease. The results proved that the solution could enable costless data integrity and flexible access management during data sharing.

Conclusions: DLT integrated with IoT technologies could greatly improve the health-related data sharing. The proposed solution based on IOTA Tangle and MAM could overcome many challenges faced by other traditional blockchain-based solutions in terms of cost, efficiency, scalability, and flexibility in data access management. This study also showed the possibility of fully decentralized health data sharing by replacing the local server with edge computing devices.

Keywords: IOTA Tangle; Internet of Things; blockchain; data sharing; distributed ledger technologies; health information interoperability; intelligent healthcare; masked authenticated messaging.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
An example of Merkle Hash Tree with 4 leaves.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Structure of a Masked Authenticated Messaging stream with 2 transactions.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Architecture of the proposed health data sharing system based on IOTA Tangle. GPS: Global Positioning System; MAM: Masked Authenticated Messaging.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Prototype of the health data sharing system using smartwatches, smartphone, air sensors, and Raspberry Pi. MAM: Masked Authenticated Messaging.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Environmental data published to the Tangle with public Masked Authenticated Messaging mode.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Patient report data published to the Tangle with restricted Masked Authenticated Messaging mode.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Granular access control over messages published over the Tangle by combing public and restricted Masked Authenticated Messaging protocol.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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