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. 2020 Apr 13;20(8):2195.
doi: 10.3390/s20082195.

Towards a Remote Monitoring of Patient Vital Signs Based on IoT-Based Blockchain Integrity Management Platforms in Smart Hospitals

Faisal Jamil  1 , Shabir Ahmad  1 , Naeem Iqbal  1 , Do-Hyeun Kim  1
Affiliations

Towards a Remote Monitoring of Patient Vital Signs Based on IoT-Based Blockchain Integrity Management Platforms in Smart Hospitals

Faisal Jamil et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

Over the past several years, many healthcare applications have been developed to enhancethe healthcare industry. Recent advancements in information technology and blockchain technologyhave revolutionized electronic healthcare research and industry. The innovation of miniaturizedhealthcare sensors for monitoring patient vital signs has improved and secured the human healthcaresystem. The increase in portable health devices has enhanced the quality of health-monitoringstatus both at an activity/fitness level for self-health tracking and at a medical level, providing moredata to clinicians with potential for earlier diagnosis and guidance of treatment. When sharingpersonal medical information, data security and comfort are essential requirements for interactionwith and collection of electronic medical records. However, it is hard for current systems to meetthese requirements because they have inconsistent security policies and access control structures.The new solutions should be directed towards improving data access, and should be managed bythe government in terms of privacy and security requirements to ensure the reliability of data formedical purposes. Blockchain paves the way for a revolution in the traditional pharmaceuticalindustry and benefits from unique features such as privacy and transparency of data. In this paper,we propose a novel platform for monitoring patient vital signs using smart contracts based onblockchain. The proposed system is designed and developed using hyperledger fabric, which isan enterprise-distributed ledger framework for developing blockchain-based applications. Thisapproach provides several benefits to the patients, such as an extensive, immutable history log, andglobal access to medical information from anywhere at any time. The Libelium e-Health toolkitis used to acquire physiological data. The performance of the designed and developed system isevaluated in terms of transaction per second, transaction latency, and resource utilization usinga standard benchmark tool known as Hyperledger Caliper. It is found that the proposed systemoutperforms the traditional health care system for monitoring patient data.

Keywords: blockchain; hyperledger fabric; internet of things; smart contract; smart healthcare.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Applications of blockchain in healthcare.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Proposed layered-based healthcare IoT blockchain platform architecture for secure vital-sign monitoring.
Figure 3
Figure 3
System workflow of the proposed healthcare IoT blockchain platform.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Identity issue for network user.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Sequence diagram of operation in the proposed healthcare IoT platform.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Healthcare IoT blockchain platform implementation and use case deployment for secure monitoring of vital signs.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Experimental environment of medical blockchain network.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Vital-sign reading with different sensors.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Web-based user interface for vital-sign monitoring with Hyperledger Fabric.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Transaction Per Second (TPS).
Figure 11
Figure 11
Latency in Invoke Transaction.
Figure 12
Figure 12
Latency in Query Transaction.
Figure 13
Figure 13
Comparison of processing overhead in proposed healthcare IoT blockchain.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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