Blockchain-based Health Data Sharing for Continuous Disease Surveillance in Smart Environments

The Covid-19 pandemic ushered in multiple paradigms of personal health data sharing with particular emphasis on Person-to-Institution sharing and Institution-toInstitution sharing. While the data aggregated by technology companies and health authorities was instrumental in the development of vaccines and ultimately flattening the curve of infection rates, egregious abuses of privacy occurred. In many instances acceptable guarantees of appropriate utility for the data were not made available. Personal health data sharing for the containment of infections with privacy limitations present a classic case of collaboration among mutually distrustful entities. In this regard the blockchain network and attendant protocols for data integrity, transaction transmission and provenance can prove useful. Thus, in this paper we present a blockchain-based method for disease surveillance in a smart environment where smart contracts are deployed to monitor public locations instead of individuals. The data aggregated is analysed and tagged with a lifetime commensurate with the time for infection. Once the data utility period has elapsed the monitored data are removed from the active surveillance pool and the entities involved can be notified. Such a method of continual surveillance protects privacy by shifting the emphasis from individuals to locations. Experimental data suggests this method is efficient and can be implemented on top of existing disease surveillance strategies for later pandemics.