A Secure Remote Healthcare System for Hospital Using Blockchain Smart Contract

Abstract

Nowadays, a combination between Internet of Things (IoT) technology and remote healthcare system is extensively researched due to its efficiency and convenience for human life. When the number of IoT devices in health care system is increased exponentially, the privacy and security issues of patients are becoming a concern. In order to protect personal and device-generated information, we propose to use blockchain-based smart contracts for managing patients' information and medical devices. In detail, using blockchain based on the Ethereum protocol, we create a remote healthcare system including healthcare provider (such as hospital), healthcare professionals (doctors) and patients. Health condition of patients is measured by sensors and such information is written into blockchain automatically. In addition, we propose a processing mechanism to store the medical device information efficiently and sparingly in accordance with health situation of patient. Concretely, we filter the data from sensors before deciding whether to write data into blockchain or not. Doing so we can reduce the size of blockchain as well as save amount of coins for transaction efficiently. However, the abnormal data from sensors will be written to blockchain immediately and trigger an emergency contact to doctor and hospital for on-time treatment. We have verified the proposed smart contract on Ethereum test environment called TESTRPC and implemented the system on an experimental environment with real devices. This system works well at small scale.