Trusted Traceability and Certification of Refurbished Medical Devices Using Dynamic Composable NFTs

Abstract

Medical devices play a crucial role in the global healthcare system, but their high cost has led to the increasing adoption of refurbished medical devices as a sustainable alternative for hospitals and patients around the world. The repositioning of refurbished devices into the market, however, is accompanied by a number of challenges, including concerns about quality and safety, as well as the risk of fraudulent activities such as counterfeiting. To address these challenges, we propose an NFT-based solution for managing refurbished medical devices that creates a secure, transparent, and verifiable record of the refurbishment process to ensure the safety and quality of these devices. The proposed solution utilizes dynamic composable NFTs as digital representations of medical devices, with replacement parts and certificate documents embedded in a parent-child NFT hierarchy, and reprocessing steps captured and reflected through the evolution of the dynamic tokens. This serves to authenticate and track the movement of refurbished devices while also providing a trustworthy means of managing individual devices and their ownership. Furthermore, the integration of non-transferable NFTs as certificates of refurbishment acts as an effective mechanism for detecting suspect medical devices and instances of fraudulent labeling, thereby increasing buyer confidence and promoting user safety. We leverage the Interplanetary File System to store and keep track of the metadata of the tokenized components of the system. We present the system architecture and implementation details with tested algorithms. We develop a front-end decentralized application (DApp) to interact with the designed smart contracts and showcase their functionalities. We also conduct security analysis to demonstrate our system is resistant to common vulnerabilities and exploits. The smart contract code is made available on GitHub.

Keywords

• Blockchain
• non-fungible tokens (NFTs)
• healthcare
• refurbished products
• trust
• traceability