Consortium Blockchain for Reliable Remote Health Monitoring

Abstract Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) are being used across many healthcare uses cases, however these low power devices are often susceptible to cyberattacks, which can compromise medical data security, and privacy. In addition, any critical system design must address a single-point-of-failure (SPoF) as this has a direct impact on the reliability of the deployed environment. One of the ways to overcome these challenges is to secure the IoMT deployments with blockchain technologies. Although blockchain-based digital services promise trust, accountability, and transparency, there are multiple challenges associated with a combined use of IoMT and blockchain, especially for Remote Health Monitoring (RHM). Some of the recent literature describes possible solutions to these challenges however these do not address the challenges fully and are also not foolproof. In comparison to public blockchains, private blockchains are considerably safe, however, low data availability is one of the major challenges of private blockchains due to its centralized architecture and reliability is hard to achieve as only one enterprise controls the complete system. Health systems needs to be highly available and reliable to ensure real-time patient data availability, especially for monitoring patients with critical illnesses where downtime for data retrieval and unreliable data can be fatal. In this article, we provide an implementation of a reliable consortium blockchain based RHM application for monitoring critically ill patients in a home environment. The results show that a well-designed consortium blockchain can enhance reliability and avoids a single point of failure, resulting in better health and safety for the patients.