Blockchain-based health care monitoring for privacy preservation of COVID-19 medical records

The explosion and unpredictable global spread of COVID-19 has revealed the shortcomings of conventional health care systems in dealing with public health emergencies in a timely manner. The health care system enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) is competent for tracking COVID-19 patients efficiently through an integrated network. The popular technologies in digital health care monitoring pose serious risks in terms of privacy and security issues such as data transfer and data transaction logging. Such medical data confidentiality and privacy issues could result in a delay in the advancement of treatment, thus endangering the patient's life. This chapter aims to assist infected people online by smart devices using IoT and Blockchain technologies. IoT-based health care smart devices gather valuable information and provide additional perceptions into symptoms and behaviors. Blockchain facilitates the secure exchange of information concerning patient health and it controls the medical delivery network. Blockchains are computationally expensive and require a high bandwidth with extra computing power, and therefore they are not completely suitable for most resource-constrained IoT devices intended for smart cities. Here, a customized blockchain model framework is proposed that is appropriate for the dispersed IoT devices, which are added with enhanced network confidentiality characteristics. Here, proxy reencryption and advanced cryptographic primitives are used to satisfy the additional privacy and security properties. This study provides a structure for COVID-19 infectious disease patients, and discusses electronic medical record issues and diagnostics. The work also highlights the data and transactions over a blockchain-based network that is more secure and anonymous. A widespread security analysis demonstrates that the model being introduced is certifiably successful for ensuring the privacy and resistance to intrusion. Finally, the performance assessment signifies that the projected model realizes superior overall efficiency as compared to other techniques.