An Overview of Blockchain and IoT Integration for Secure and Reliable Health Records Monitoring

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain (BC) are reliable technologies widely employed in various contexts. IoT devices have a lot of potential for data sensing and recording without human intervention, but they also have processing and security issues. Due to their limited computing power, IoT devices cannot use specialized cryptographic security mechanisms. There are various challenges when using traditional cryptographic techniques to transport and store medical records securely. The general public’s health depends on having an electronic health record (EHR) system that is current. In the era of e-health and m-health, problems with integrating data from various EHRs, preserving data interoperability, and ensuring that all data access is in the patient’s hands are all obstacles to creating a dependable EHR system. If health records get into the wrong hands, they could endanger the lives of patients and their right to privacy. BC technology has become a potent tool for ensuring recorded data’s immutability, validity, and confidentiality while enabling decentralized storage. This study focuses on EHR and other types of e-healthcare, evaluating the advantages of complementary technologies and the underlying functional principles. The major BC consensus mechanisms for BC-based EHR systems are analyzed in this study. It also examines several IoT-EHR frameworks’ current infrastructures. A breakdown of BC integration’s benefits with the IoT-EHR framework is also offered. A BC-based IoT-EHR architecture has been developed to enable the automated sensing of patient records and to store and retrieve these records in a secure and reliable environment. Finally, we conduct a security study to demonstrate the security of our suggested EHR framework.