Abstract

Keywords

۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Related work

۳٫ Overview of blockchain and IoMT

۴٫ Blockchain-enabled IoMT

۵٫ Applications of BCeMT

۶٫ Future directions

۷٫ Conclusion

Declaration of Competing Interest

Acknowledgments

References

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.

۱٫ Introduction

Since the year 2020, the whole world has been struggling to fight against the spread of the new coronavirus disease called SARS-CoV-2 (aka, COVID-19). COVID-19 is a dangerous respiratory infection that rapidly spreads from humans to humans. Even though many countries are sparing their efforts to slow down or control the outbreaks of COVID-19 and gradually restore regular lives, we still have a long way to go before the COVID-19 pandemic being fully solved. The widespread of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an adverse influence on almost all aspects of human life and has also exposed the limitations on medical sources of the current healthcare systems.

Since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, substantial efforts have been paid on exploiting technological advances to effectively fight against this disease. Among all these technologies, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is one of the most promising approaches to help to prevent the widespread of this infectious disease [1], [2]. IoMT is a remote healthcare system, which is mainly composed of medical sensor devices, medical data servers, and professional medical staff (i.e., doctors, nurses, and so on). The medical sensor devices (including various biomedical sensors, RFID tags, and QR tags) collect the medical data of patients and then transmit the data to medical data servers. The authorized professional medical staff can then access the medical data, conduct an early diagnosis, and provide medical therapy measures. Meanwhile, IoMT can monitor the status of patients so as to provide professional medical support.