JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Pervasive and ubiquitous healthcare devices create mhealth and uhealth data that are voluminous and stored in centralized systems without explicit patient consent for a short while. Most of this data, however, is lost because the user(s), device manufacturer(s), or other intermediaries do not provide perpetual storage or facilitate analysis. The utility of data, when combined with clinical health data, the utility of such data can improve the predictive power for data-driven analytics and users' health conditions. Such analysis can predict health events and often prevent diseases through proactive diagnosis.

Objective:

Using a proof-of-concept prototype with Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), we demonstrate decentralized marketplace functionality using the blockchain. We then propose that such marketplaces can improve provenance, data accuracy, security, and privacy of mhealth and uhealth data. We demonstrate how a marketplace works and argue that a marketplace approach to mhealth and uhealth data benefits all participants

Methods:

We use the Ethereum blockchain and MATIC sidechain, the solidity smart contract programming language, the web3.js library, and nodejs with the MetaMask application to create our system. We use design science research methodology (DSRM), which consists of the following stages: (i) definition of the problem and system objectives, (ii)the design and implementation of blockchain with smart contracts for healthcare data marketplaces (optional) user-driven encryption of patient data for secure off-chain storage, (iii)evaluation of the proposed design and implementation against existing system design objectives, and (iv) communicating the benefits.

Results:

We implement decentralized healthcare data marketplaces catering to the mhealth and uhealth data sources. Our prototype evaluates and demonstrates how such an approach to mhealth and uhealth can improve data privacy, access control, and security and provide interfaces to application developers and others to analyze such data. We can argue about the benefits of such a marketplace, compared to centralized repositories and even Health exchanges, illustrating key features of the marketplace.

Conclusions:

A decentralized marketplace approach to handling user mhealth and uhealth data ensures that data quality, and data availability, can be combined with data privacy, data access auditability, and security. We believe that commonplace in the future and different incentivization models for highly accurate personal healthcare data will fuel entire industries of innovation based on unique datasets when combined with traditional clinical healthcare data. Domains such as telehealth, telemedicine, and robotics would reduce costs and improve quality by implementing decentralized marketplaces.