Is blockchain for Internet of Medical Things a panacea for COVID-19 pandemic?

Xuran LI, Bishenghui TAO, Hong Ning DAI*, Muhammad IMRAN, Dehuan WAN, Dengwang LI

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

37 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply influenced the lifestyle of the general public and the healthcare system of the society. As a promising approach to address the emerging challenges caused by the epidemic of infectious diseases like COVID-19, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) deployed in hospitals, clinics, and healthcare centers can save the diagnosis time and improve the efficiency of medical resources though privacy and security concerns of IoMT stall the wide adoption. In order to tackle the privacy, security, and interoperability issues of IoMT, we propose a framework of blockchain-enabled IoMT by introducing blockchain to incumbent IoMT systems. In this paper, we review the benefits of this architecture and illustrate the opportunities brought by blockchain-enabled IoMT. We also provide use cases of blockchain-enabled IoMT on fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic, including the prevention of infectious diseases, location sharing and contact tracing, and the supply chain of injectable medicines. We also outline future work in this area.

Original languageEnglish
Article number101434
JournalPervasive and Mobile Computing
Volume75
Early online date8 Jun 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Imran’s work is supported by the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University through research group project number RG-1435-051 .

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier B.V.

Keywords

  • Blockchain
  • COVID-19
  • Internet of Medical Things
  • Privacy
  • Security

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Is blockchain for Internet of Medical Things a panacea for COVID-19 pandemic?'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this