BIoTHR: Electronic Health Record Servicing Scheme in IoT-Blockchain Ecosystem

The pervasiveness of newly introduced Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices has opened up new opportunities in healthcare systems, for example in facilitating remote patient monitoring. There are, however, security and privacy considerations in the transmission of data from these devices to the backend server, and across heterogeneous IoT networks. In this study, we propose a novel privacy-preserving scheme which is based on blockchain and swarm exchange techniques to facilitate seamless and secure transmission of user data (e.g., electronic health record (EHR)-related information) through secured swarm nodes of peer-to-peer communications. BIoTHR refers to the proposed scheme on the private blockchain-assisted EHR management using IoT. Specifically, new blockchain and swarm exchange infrastructures are suggested as a backbone of the proposed scheme to ensure secure and reliable data transmission and timely monitoring of data sent across IoT networks. An autonomous encryption-decryption mechanism is also utilized, along with a dynamic and modular server assistance technology to deploy EHR transmission in a secure manner. Moreover, several swarm-listen, announcement, peer open and peer closing algorithms are incorporated to employ the actual power of pervasive EHR transmission for better e-healthcare service provisioning. The proposed scheme is developed using the open-source tools of GnuPG, IPFS, and Golang. Proposed study simulates a number of heterogeneous IoT-based health sensor nodes, namely, body temperature, pulse rate, and oxygen saturation, i.e., SPO2, galvanic skin response, and blood glucose in blockchain-assisted swarm exchange framework. The results reveal that the proposed scheme, in terms of blockchain-IoT, swarm exchange and EHR transmission, outperforms several peer techniques.