Blockchain-Based Mobile Edge Computing Framework for Secure Therapy Applications

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is being introduced and leveraged in many domains, but few studies have addressed MEC for secure in-home therapy management. To this end, this paper presents an in-home therapy management framework, which leverages the IoT nodes and the blockchain-based decentralized MEC paradigm to support low-latency, secure, anonymous, and always-available spatiotemporal multimedia therapeutic data communication within an on-demand data-sharing scenario. To the best of our knowledge, this non-invasive, MEC-based IoT therapy platform is first done by our group. This platform can provide a full-body joint range of motion data for physically challenged individuals in a decentralized manner. With MEC, the framework can provide therapy diagnostic and analytical data on demand to a large portion of humanity who are either born with disabilities or became disabled due to accidents, war-time injuries, or old age. For security, the framework uses blockchain–Tor-based distributed transactions to preserve the therapeutic data privacy, ownership, generation, storage, and sharing. Our initial test results from a complete implementation of the framework show that it can support a sufficiently large number of users without considerable increase in mean processing time.