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

Abstract

Over the past several years, many healthcare applications have been developed to enhance the healthcare industry. Recent advancements in information technology and blockchain technology have revolutionized electronic healthcare research and industry. The innovation of miniaturized healthcare sensors for monitoring patient vital signs has improved and secured the human healthcare system. The increase in portable health devices has enhanced the quality of health-monitoring status both at an activity/fitness level for self-health tracking and at a medical level, providing more data to clinicians with potential for earlier diagnosis and guidance of treatment. When sharing personal medical information, data security and comfort are essential requirements for interaction with and collection of electronic medical records. However, it is hard for current systems to meet these 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 by the government in terms of privacy and security requirements to ensure the reliability of data for medical purposes. Blockchain paves the way for a revolution in the traditional pharmaceutical industry 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 on blockchain. The proposed system is designed and developed using hyperledger fabric, which is an enterprise-distributed ledger framework for developing blockchain-based applications. This approach provides several benefits to the patients, such as an extensive, immutable history log, and global access to medical information from anywhere at any time. The Libelium e-Health toolkit is used to acquire physiological data. The performance of the designed and developed system is evaluated in terms of transaction per second, transaction latency, and resource utilization using a standard benchmark tool known as Hyperledger Caliper. It is found that the proposed system outperforms the traditional health care system for monitoring patient data.