Combining distributed and centralised approaches to develop a hybrid methodology for data management in healthcare

In the 21st century, the combination of rapid technological developments as well as the adoption of emerging technologies has impacted almost every area of everyday life. These developments have even affected domains that traditionally operate without the help of Information and Communication technologies (ICT) but now see an increase in digitization of their processes. Healthcare is one of those domains that is being revolutionized via the emergence of the e-health and m-health paradigms as well as the automation of medical processes, robotics, and Internet of Things (IoT) medical devices and sensors. These developments, apart from modernizing healthcare and providing quality-of-life solutions to both healthcare practitioners and patients, have also led to an increase in the availability of digital medical data, which are nowadays being structured in Electronic Health Records (EHRs). EHRs contain various health data about a patient and are the basis for the development and implementation of various innovative solutions in healthcare. Such solutions mainly aim to address some of the current shortcomings of EHRs such as the centralized storage, which makes them vulnerable to mass hacker attacks as well as the lack of interoperability among various medical standards that are used to structure EHRs, which makes it hard to manage and share them across different healthcare providers. The scope of this publication is to introduce blockchain technology as a potential solution to the aforementioned challenges and present a novel methodology and architecture that have been developed to be implemented in a healthcare application. The methodology presented in this paper leverages both blockchain and centralized databases, making it a hybrid approach but aims to set the basis for developing blockchain-powered healthcare solutions for data management. Under that context and the need to combine blockchain with centralized databases, the security parameters of the system are also tailored to work specifically with that kind of approach. The end-goal of the methodology and architecture presented in this publication is to give patients ownership of their data, help them manage and share them as they see fit, while at the same time keeping in mind that large healthcare providers must have access to the same information in a secure manner for the well-being of their patients. It is considered that this hybrid approach offers a well-tailored solution for both stakeholders. © Ibero-American WWW / Internet Conference 2020

Methodology for secure storage and information exchange of medical data based on blockchain

The rapid technological developments of the 21st century and the adoption of Internet 4.0 technologies in all fac-ets of everyday life, has led to the digitization of services even in areas that have traditionally operated without the help of technology. One of the areas that is being modernized due to the abovementioned developments is that of health care. Medical process automation, robotics and medical devices are creating a wealth of digital health data. Each patient’s health data is organized and structured in electronic health records (EHR), which are usually stored in the central databases of healthcare providers. Although EHRs offer many possibilities, the centralized data storage makes them vulnerable to malicious attack, and they do not provide interoperability between the systems of differ-ent healthcare providers. Blockchain is a technology that provides appropriate solutions and which can eliminate the abovementioned challenges in the healthcare sector. Decentralized data storage and data management by the patients themselves can provide greater security, interoperability and, generally, more efficient health services. The scope of this paper work is to present the challenges in the field of eHealth, to introduce blockchain as a solution for most of these challenges, and to present appropriate methodology that can be used to store medical data in a healthcare application based on blockchain. The methodology presented is already being developed and applied in in the context of the Impilo research project, which aims to develop a blockchain-based social networking application in the healthcare domain. © Athens Medical Society

SARMENTI: in-situ real-time soil nutrients and gaseous emission measurement

International audienceThis paper presents the vision of the H2020 EU project SARMENTI whose objective is to develop an IoT device that monitors in real-time and in situ nutrients in the soil and gaseous emissions just above the soil, and provide advices to the farmer regarding appropriate fertilization strategies. The development methodology is presented here, the measurement requirements being established with end-users. Then the device architecture is summarized