Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Feb 2, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 4, 2019 - Apr 1, 2019
Date Accepted: Aug 6, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Building a Secure Biomedical Data Sharing Decentralized App (DApp): Tutorial
Decentralized apps (DApps) are computer programs that run on a distributed computing system, such as a blockchain network. Unlike the client-server architecture that powers most internet apps, DApps that are integrated with a blockchain network can execute app logic that is guaranteed to be transparent, verifiable, and immutable. This new paradigm has a number of unique properties that are attractive to the biomedical and health care communities. However, instructional resources are scarcely available for biomedical software developers to begin building DApps on a blockchain. Such apps require new ways of thinking about how to build, maintain, and deploy software. This tutorial serves as a complete working prototype of a DApp, motivated by a real use case in biomedical research requiring data privacy. We describe the architecture of a DApp, the implementation details of a smart contract, a sample iPhone operating system (iOS) DApp that interacts with the smart contract, and the development tools and libraries necessary to get started. The code necessary to recreate the app is publicly available.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.