JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Huge amount of health-related data are generated every moment with the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable technologies. These big health data contain great value and can bring benefit to all stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem. Currently, most of these data are siloed and fragmented in different healthcare systems or public and private databases. It prevents the fulfillment of intelligent healthcare inspired by these big data. Security/privacy concerns and the lack of ensured authenticity trails of data bring even more obstacles to health data sharing. With a decentralized and consensus-driven nature, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) provide reliable solutions, such as blockchain, Ethereum and IOTA Tangle, to facilitate the healthcare data sharing.

Objective:

Develop a health-related data sharing system by integrating IoT and DLT to enable secure, fee-less, tamper-resist, high-scalable and granular controllable health data exchange. Build a prototype and conduct experiments to verify the feasibility of the proposed solution.

Methods:

The health-related data are generated by two types of IoT devices, wearable/mobile devices and stationary air quality sensors. The data sharing mechanism is enabled by IOTA’s distributed ledger, the Tangle, which is a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) is adopted to facilitate data communications among different parties. Merkle Hash Tree (MHT) is used for data encryption and verification.

Results:

A prototype system was built according to the proposed solution, using smartwatches, smartphones, several air sensors and Raspberry Pi. The prototype was applied to the remote diagnosis of tremor disease. The results proved that the solution could enable costless data integrity and control its access management in a fully decentralized manner during data sharing. Users can easily authorize or revoke the access to their data to different subscribers.

Conclusions:

DLT integrated with IoT technologies could greatly improve the health-related data sharing. The proposed solution based on IOTA Tangle and MAM could overcome many challenges faced by other traditional blockchain-based solutions in terms of cost, efficiency, scalability and flexibility in data access management.