Zheng Xiaochen, Sun Shengjing, Mukkamala Raghava Rao, Vatrapu Ravi, Ordieres-Meré Joaquín
Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
Centre for Business Data Analytics, Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark.
J Med Internet Res. 2019 Jun 6;21(6):e13583. doi: 10.2196/13583.
Huge amounts of health-related data are generated every moment with the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable technologies. These big health data contain great value and can bring benefit to all stakeholders in the health care ecosystem. Currently, most of these data are siloed and fragmented in different health care systems or public and private databases. It prevents the fulfillment of intelligent health care inspired by these big data. Security and privacy concerns and the lack of ensured authenticity trails of data bring even more obstacles to health data sharing. With a decentralized and consensus-driven nature, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) provide reliable solutions such as blockchain, Ethereum, and IOTA Tangle to facilitate the health care data sharing.
This study aimed to develop a health-related data sharing system by integrating IoT and DLT to enable secure, fee-less, tamper-resistant, highly-scalable, and granularly-controllable health data exchange, as well as build a prototype and conduct experiments to verify the feasibility of the proposed solution.
The health-related data are generated by 2 types of IoT devices: wearable devices and stationary air quality sensors. The data sharing mechanism is enabled by IOTA's distributed ledger, the Tangle, which is a directed acyclic graph. Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) is adopted to facilitate data communications among different parties. Merkle Hash Tree is used for data encryption and verification.
A prototype system was built according to the proposed solution. It uses a smartwatch and multiple air sensors as the sensing layer; a smartphone and a single-board computer (Raspberry Pi) as the gateway; and a local server for data publishing. The prototype was applied to the remote diagnosis of tremor disease. The results proved that the solution could enable costless data integrity and flexible access management during data sharing.
DLT integrated with IoT technologies could greatly improve the health-related data sharing. The proposed solution based on IOTA Tangle and MAM could overcome many challenges faced by other traditional blockchain-based solutions in terms of cost, efficiency, scalability, and flexibility in data access management. This study also showed the possibility of fully decentralized health data sharing by replacing the local server with edge computing devices.
随着物联网（IoT）和可穿戴技术的快速发展，每时每刻都会产生大量与健康相关的数据。这些海量健康数据蕴含巨大价值，能为医疗保健生态系统中的所有利益相关者带来益处。目前，这些数据大多分散在不同的医疗保健系统或公共及私有数据库中，处于孤立和碎片化状态。这阻碍了受这些大数据启发的智能医疗保健的实现。安全和隐私问题以及数据缺乏可靠的真实性追踪，给健康数据共享带来了更多障碍。分布式账本技术（DLT）具有去中心化和共识驱动的特性，为促进医疗保健数据共享提供了可靠的解决方案，如区块链、以太坊和IOTA缠结。
本研究旨在通过整合物联网和分布式账本技术开发一个与健康相关的数据共享系统，以实现安全、免费、防篡改、高度可扩展且粒度可控的健康数据交换，并构建一个原型并进行实验，以验证所提出解决方案的可行性。
与健康相关的数据由两种物联网设备生成：可穿戴设备和固定式空气质量传感器。数据共享机制由IOTA的分布式账本缠结启用，缠结是一种有向无环图。采用掩码认证消息（MAM）来促进不同方之间的数据通信。默克尔哈希树用于数据加密和验证。
根据所提出的解决方案构建了一个原型系统。它使用智能手表和多个空气传感器作为传感层；智能手机和单板计算机（树莓派）作为网关；以及一个本地服务器用于数据发布。该原型应用于震颤疾病的远程诊断。结果证明，该解决方案能够在数据共享期间实现无成本的数据完整性和灵活的访问管理。
分布式账本技术与物联网技术的集成可以极大地改善与健康相关的数据共享。基于IOTA缠结和MAM提出的解决方案在成本、效率、可扩展性以及数据访问管理的灵活性方面可以克服其他传统区块链解决方案面临的许多挑战。本研究还展示了通过用边缘计算设备取代本地服务器来实现完全去中心化健康数据共享的可能性。
