Ahmad Raja Wasim, Salah Khaled, Jayaraman Raja, Yaqoob Ibrar, Ellahham Samer, Omar Mohammed
College of Engineering and Information Technology, Ajman University, Ajman, UAE.
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE.
Cluster Comput. 2023 Apr 29:1-26. doi: 10.1007/s10586-023-04009-7.
The year 2020 has witnessed the emergence of coronavirus (COVID-19) that has rapidly spread and adversely affected the global economy, health, and human lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the limitations of existing healthcare systems regarding their inadequacy to timely and efficiently handle public health emergencies. A large portion of today's healthcare systems are centralized and fall short in providing necessary information security and privacy, data immutability, transparency, and traceability features to detect fraud related to COVID-19 vaccination certification, and anti-body testing. Blockchain technology can assist in combating the COVID-19 pandemic by ensuring safe and reliable medical supplies, accurate identification of virus hot spots, and establishing data provenance to verify the genuineness of personal protective equipment. This paper discusses the potential blockchain applications for the COVID-19 pandemic. It presents the high-level design of three blockchain-based systems to enable governments and medical professionals to efficiently handle health emergencies caused by COVID-19. It discusses the important ongoing blockchain-based research projects, use cases, and case studies to demonstrate the adoption of blockchain technology for COVID-19. Finally, it identifies and discusses future research challenges, along with their key causes and guidelines.
2020年见证了冠状病毒（COVID-19）的出现，它迅速传播并对全球经济、健康和人类生活产生了不利影响。COVID-19大流行暴露了现有医疗系统在及时有效应对突发公共卫生事件方面的不足。当今大部分医疗系统都是集中式的，在提供必要的信息安全和隐私、数据不可变、透明度和可追溯性等功能以检测与COVID-19疫苗接种证明及抗体检测相关的欺诈行为方面存在欠缺。区块链技术可以通过确保医疗用品的安全可靠、准确识别病毒热点地区以及建立数据来源以验证个人防护装备的真伪，来协助抗击COVID-19大流行。本文讨论了区块链在应对COVID-19大流行方面的潜在应用。它展示了三个基于区块链的系统的高层设计，以使政府和医疗专业人员能够有效应对由COVID-19引发的突发卫生事件。它讨论了正在进行的重要的基于区块链的研究项目、用例和案例研究，以证明区块链技术在COVID-19方面的应用。最后，它识别并讨论了未来的研究挑战以及其主要原因和指导方针。
