When Mobile Blockchain Meets Edge Computing

Blockchain, as the backbone technology of the current popular Bitcoin digital currency, has become a promising decentralized data management framework. Although blockchain has been widely adopted in many applications, e.g., finance, healthcare, and logistics, its application in mobile services is still limited. This is due to the fact that blockchain users need to solve preset proof-of-work puzzles to add new data, i.e., a block, to the blockchain. Solving the proof-of-work, however, consumes substantial resources in terms of CPU time and energy, which is not suitable for resource-limited mobile devices. To facilitate blockchain applications in future mobile Internet of Things systems, multiple access mobile edge computing appears to be an auspicious solution to solve the proof-of-work puzzles for mobile users. We first introduce a novel concept of edge computing for mobile blockchain. Then, we introduce an economic approach for edge computing resource management. Moreover, a prototype of mobile edge computing enabled blockchain systems is presented with experimental results to justify the proposed concept.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Communications Magazin

Secure and Trustable Electronic Medical Records Sharing using Blockchain

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are critical, highly sensitive private information in healthcare, and need to be frequently shared among peers. Blockchain provides a shared, immutable and transparent history of all the transactions to build applications with trust, accountability and transparency. This provides a unique opportunity to develop a secure and trustable EMR data management and sharing system using blockchain. In this paper, we present our perspectives on blockchain based healthcare data management, in particular, for EMR data sharing between healthcare providers and for research studies. We propose a framework on managing and sharing EMR data for cancer patient care. In collaboration with Stony Brook University Hospital, we implemented our framework in a prototype that ensures privacy, security, availability, and fine-grained access control over EMR data. The proposed work can significantly reduce the turnaround time for EMR sharing, improve decision making for medical care, and reduce the overall costComment: AMIA 2017 Annual Symposium Proceeding

The Case of HyperLedger Fabric as a Blockchain Solution for Healthcare Applications

The healthcare industry deals with highly sensitive data which must be managed in a secure way. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) hold various kinds of personal and sensitive data which contain names, addresses, social security numbers, insurance numbers, and medical history. Such personal data is valuable to the patients, healthcare service providers, medical insurance companies, and research institutions. However, the public release of this highly sensitive personal data poses serious privacy and security threats to patients and healthcare service providers. Hence, we foresee the requirement of new technologies to address the privacy and security challenges for personal data in healthcare applications. Blockchain is one of the promising solutions, aimed to provide transparency, security, and privacy using consensus-driven decentralised data management on top of peer-to-peer distributed computing systems. Therefore, to solve the mentioned problems in healthcare applications, in this paper, we investigate the use of private blockchain technologies to assess their feasibility for healthcare applications. We create testing scenarios using HyperLedger Fabric to explore different criteria and use-cases for healthcare applications. Additionally, we thoroughly evaluate the representative test case scenarios to assess the blockchain-enabled security criteria in terms of data confidentiality, privacy and access control. The experimental evaluation reveals the promising benefits of private blockchain technologies in terms of security, regulation compliance, compatibility, flexibility, and scalability

Blockchain in radiology research and clinical practice: current trends and future directions

Blockchain usage in healthcare, in radiology, in particular, is at its very early infancy. Only a few research applications have been tested, however, blockchain technology is widely known outside healthcare and widely adopted, especially in Finance, since 2009 at least. Learning by history, radiology is a potential ideal scenario to apply this technology. Blockchain could have the potential to increase radiological data value in both clinical and research settings for the patient digital record, radiological reports, privacy control, quantitative image analysis, cybersecurity, radiomics and artificial intelligence. Up-to-date experiences using blockchain in radiology are still limited, but radiologists should be aware of the emergence of this technology and follow its next developments. We present here the potentials of some applications of blockchain in radiology

Increasing user engagement on blockchain applications through persuasive design

Blockchain gives rise to many new applications and use cases and has already markedly changed several industries, such as financial services, energy and utilities, or healthcare. Although blockchain could potentially be used disruptively for end-user applications as well, utilizing it remains poor. It appears that the unconvincing design of many end-user blockchain applications leads to insufficient user engagement. To investigate the influence of design aspects on users’ engagement of blockchain end-user applications, we developed a blockchain application for the creative industries based on the principles of persuasive design. Hereby, we aim to contribute to research in the blockchain context on how end-user applications need to be designed to increase user engagement. By using a design science research process, we can ultimately provide a total of seven recommendations for developing persuasive blockchain applications for end-users

Measuring the impact of blockchain on healthcare applications

Blockchain is a technology with potential for making ground breaking steps in addressing social, economic and healthcare challenges. The global information technology scene is being overcrowded with blockchain applications with special focus on the vast healthcare market [12]. The value of information related to healthcare creates a clear path for applying blockchain as a solution for some of the challenges in the healthcare sector, in particular with the goal of creating a fair and transparent way for sharing information and patient data. It is however a fact that while blockchain technology introduces additional complexity to the implementation healthcare software, the benefit the technology actually brings still remains unclear and difficult to evaluate. This vision paper demonstrates our research focus on providing a body of knowledge and tools to help evaluate this impact of blockchain on eHealth applications. In particular, we identify that such a research effort has to explicitly consider cost of addressing challenges inherent to the eHealth domain like integration of disparate software systems (hospitals, research institutions, government agencies, health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, etc.), the potential introduction of cryptocurrencies in healthcare systems, degree of patient service improvement, transparency and compliance to laws and regulations, and others. The more traditional influencing factors, like cost of development and running, licenses for using third-party software services, and the ones inherent to blockchain like cost of computation and energy will also have to be taken into consideration in the metrics model.</p