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

doi:10.1016/j.pmcj.2021.101434

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

Pervasive Mob Comput. 2021 Aug:75:101434. doi: 10.1016/j.pmcj.2021.101434. Epub 2021 Jun 8.

Authors

Xuran Li¹, Bishenghui Tao², Hong-Ning Dai³, Muhammad Imran⁴, Dehuan Wan⁵, Dengwang Li¹

Affiliations

¹ Shandong Key Laboratory of Medical Physics and Image Processing, School of Physics and Electronics, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, Shandong, China.
² Faculty of Information Technology, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau SAR, China.
³ Department of Computing and Decision Sciences, Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR, China.
⁴ College of Applied Computer Science, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
⁵ Guangdong University of Finance, Guangzhou, China.

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.

Keywords: Blockchain; COVID-19; Internet of Medical Things; Privacy; Security.