Care4U: Integrated healthcare systems based on blockchain

Abstract

During the COVID-19 crisis, the need to stay at home has increased dramatically. In addition, the number of sick people, especially elderly persons, has increased exponentially. In such a scenario, home monitoring of patients can ensure remote healthcare at home using advanced technologies such as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). The IoMT can monitor and transmit sensitive health data; however, it may be vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, an efficient healthcare security system is proposed for IoMT applications. In the proposed system, the medical sensors can transmit sensed encrypted health data via a mobile application to the doctor for privacy. Then, three consortium blockchains are constructed for load balancing of transactions and reducing transaction latency. They store the credentials of system entities, doctors' prescriptions and recommendations according to the data transmitted via mobile applications, and the medical treatment process. Besides, cancelable biometrics are used for providing authentication and increasing the security of the proposed medical system. The investigational results show that the proposed system outperforms existing work where the proposed model consumed less processing time by values of 18%, 22%, and 40%, and less energy for processing a 200 ​KB file by values of 9%, 13%, and 17%. Finally, the proposed model consumed less memory usage by values of 7%, 7%, and 18.75%. From these results, it is clear that the proposed system gives a very reliable and secure performance for efficiently securing medical applications.

Keywords

• Healthcare
• Blockchain
• Cyber security
• Internet of things
• Internet of Medical Things
• Cancelable biometrics