ABSTRACT
Recent technological advancements have resulted in an ever-increasing number of wearable healthcare devices. As this trend, coupled with the Internet of Things, spreads, we are seeing an ever-increasing amount of personal health data generation. Wearable medical devices and accompanying services may have countless healthcare benefits; they empower users to monitor their own health, make the data easy to share with healthcare personnel, reduce or eliminate the unnecessary doctor’s visits and lab tests, make earlier diagnosis possible, increase the chances for successful treatment, and many more. Nevertheless, without proper security and privacy measures in place, these devices and systems may bring more problems than benefits. Stolen personal healthcare data mostly includes patient's full name, address, insurance information, and social security number. This data is enough for hackers to apply for credit cards or line of credits, make fraudulent insurance claims, or simply sell the healthcare records in the darknet. One other problem is that patients may intentionally provide incorrect information to the healthcare personnel, which could result in a misdiagnosis. Another concern is that most personal devices are not considered reliable and trustworthy, and the medical data generated by these devices are classified as poor data by healthcare personnel. In this work, we elaborate the use of blockchain technology in solving the security and accessibility problems of health data collected from personal health devices. A secure, decentralized, and permissioned blockchain can be used to store the patient’s data and access history. The non-repudiation and consensus features in blockchain will help us maintain dispute-free healthcare environment. We envision the system to be user-centric, allowing the user to share their data with healthcare providers or insurance companies.
