scholarly journals Commercially Successful Blockchain Healthcare Projects: A Scoping Review

Author(s):  
Hao Sen Andrew Fang

Background: The healthcare industry is the new frontier for blockchain technology. Given its properties of immutability and decentralization, blockchain represents an opportunity for unprecedented level of privacy and security for all stakeholders by ensuring data integrity while giving patients control over their own health data. On a backdrop of rising interest in blockchain in general and blockchain healthcare applications in particular, there has been a proliferation of blockchain healthcare projects over the past few years. The aim of this review is to identify and understand real-world blockchain healthcare projects that have attained commercial success in the highly competitive blockchain market. Methods and findings: A scoping review was performed in January 2021 on all projects in the CoinMarketCap database. Following a pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, eligible projects were selected. A single reviewer then reviewed each project’s official website and whitepaper (where available) and performed data abstraction; 10 blockchain healthcare projects fulfilled the selection criteria. The review found that these projects made up 0.24% of the total number of actively tracked projects on CoinMarketCap. In terms of market capitalization, the total market capitalization for the projects was US$65,078,849, comprising less than 0.01% of the total market capitalization of all projects. Among the projects, the most frequent type was for personal health tracking. Conclusions: This review revealed that blockchain health projects currently comprise a small fraction of the overall number of commercially successful blockchain projects. However, because this sub-industry is still in its early stages, there are reasons to be optimistic that many more blockchain health projects will emerge and attain commercial success in future. Findings from this review done from an entrepreneurial perspective should help with the identification of future projects most likely to succeed.

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 2195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faisal Jamil ◽  
Shabir Ahmad ◽  
Naeem Iqbal ◽  
Do-Hyeun Kim

Over the past several years, many healthcare applications have been developed to enhance the healthcare industry. Recent advancements in information technology and blockchain technology have revolutionized electronic healthcare research and industry. The innovation of miniaturized healthcare sensors for monitoring patient vital signs has improved and secured the human healthcare system. The increase in portable health devices has enhanced the quality of health-monitoring status both at an activity/fitness level for self-health tracking and at a medical level, providing more data to clinicians with potential for earlier diagnosis and guidance of treatment. When sharing personal medical information, data security and comfort are essential requirements for interaction with and collection of electronic medical records. However, it is hard for current systems to meet these requirements because they have inconsistent security policies and access control structures. The new solutions should be directed towards improving data access, and should be managed by the government in terms of privacy and security requirements to ensure the reliability of data for medical purposes. Blockchain paves the way for a revolution in the traditional pharmaceutical industry and benefits from unique features such as privacy and transparency of data. In this paper, we propose a novel platform for monitoring patient vital signs using smart contracts based on blockchain. The proposed system is designed and developed using hyperledger fabric, which is an enterprise-distributed ledger framework for developing blockchain-based applications. This approach provides several benefits to the patients, such as an extensive, immutable history log, and global access to medical information from anywhere at any time. The Libelium e-Health toolkit is used to acquire physiological data. The performance of the designed and developed system is evaluated in terms of transaction per second, transaction latency, and resource utilization using a standard benchmark tool known as Hyperledger Caliper. It is found that the proposed system outperforms the traditional health care system for monitoring patient data.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 5889
Author(s):  
Faiza Hashim ◽  
Khaled Shuaib ◽  
Farag Sallabi

Electronic health records (EHRs) are important assets of the healthcare system and should be shared among medical practitioners to improve the accuracy and efficiency of diagnosis. Blockchain technology has been investigated and adopted in healthcare as a solution for EHR sharing while preserving privacy and security. Blockchain can revolutionize the healthcare system by providing a decentralized, distributed, immutable, and secure architecture. However, scalability has always been a bottleneck in blockchain networks due to the consensus mechanism and ledger replication to all network participants. Sharding helps address this issue by artificially partitioning the network into small groups termed shards and processing transactions parallelly while running consensus within each shard with a subset of blockchain nodes. Although this technique helps resolve issues related to scalability, cross-shard communication overhead can degrade network performance. This study proposes a transaction-based sharding technique wherein shards are formed on the basis of a patient’s previously visited health entities. Simulation results show that the proposed technique outperforms standard-based healthcare blockchain techniques in terms of the number of appointments processed, consensus latency, and throughput. The proposed technique eliminates cross-shard communication by forming complete shards based on “the need to participate” nodes per patient.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Cordelia Onyinyechi Omodero ◽  
Philip Olasupo Alege

The growth of an emerging capital market is necessary and requires all available resources and inputs from various sources to realize this objective. Several debates on government bonds’ contribution to Nigeria’s capital market developmental growth have ensued but have not triggered comprehensive studies in this area. The present research work seeks to close the breach by probing the impact of government bonds on developing the capital market in Nigeria from 2003–2019. We employ total market capitalization as the response variable to proxy the capital market, while various government bonds serve as the independent variables. The inflation rate moderates the predictor components. The research uses multiple regression technique to assess the explanatory variables’ impact on the total market capitalization. At the same time, diagnostic tests help guarantee the normality of the regression model’s data distribution and appropriateness. The findings reveal that the Federal Government of Nigeria’s (FGN) bond is statistically significant and positive in influencing Nigeria’s capital market growth. The other predictor variables are not found significant in this study. The study suggests that the Government should improve on the government bonds’ coupon, while still upholding the none default norm in paying interest and refunding principal to investors when due.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 266
Author(s):  
Ziaul Haque Munim ◽  
Okan Duru ◽  
Enna Hirata

Blockchain technology, since its introduction, has been expected to be implemented in many areas. Cryptocurrency is one unique example that established a functioning application. On the other hand, blockchain technology is not immune to various challenges related to the nature of itself, privacy management, and antitrust laws, among others. This study lays out the nature of blockchain and applications in the maritime industry, while highlighting the bottlenecks. Potential resolutions and anticipated developments are proposed. To do this, we adopt a systematic approach and present an overview of blockchain in maritime literature. In addition, the fundamental problems with blockchain are investigated, beginning from their essentials to the pain points that are claimed to need improvement. For establishing a legitimate and practically meaningful blockchain platform, stakeholders need to achieve pluralism (consensus validation), privacy, and security of the system.


Author(s):  
Yibo Zhu ◽  
Rasik R Jankay ◽  
Laura C Pieratt ◽  
Ranjana K. Mehta

Extensive research has been conducted to study the effects of physical and sleep related fatigue on occupational health and safety. However, fatigue is a complex multidimensional construct, that is task- and occupation-dependent, and our knowledge on how to measure this complex construct is limited. A scoping review was conducted to: 1) review sensors and their metrics currently employed in occupational fatigue studies, 2) identify overlap between sensors and associated metrics that can be leveraged to assess comprehensive fatigue, 3) investigating the effectiveness of the sensors/metrics, and 4) recommended potential sensor/metric combinations to evaluate comprehensive fatigue. 512 unique abstracts were identified through Ovid-MEDLINE, MEDLINE, Embase and Cinal databases and application of the inclusion/exclusion criteria resulted in 27 articles that were included for the review. Heart rate sensors and actigraphs were identified to be the most suitable devices to study comprehensive fatigue. Heart rate trend within the heart rate sensor, and sleep length and sleep efficiency within actigraphs were found to be the most popular and reliable metrics for measuring occupational fatigue.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-40
Author(s):  
Nelson Pacheco Rocha ◽  
Gonçalo Santinha ◽  
Mário Rodrigues ◽  
Carlos Rodrigues ◽  
Alexandra Queirós ◽  
...  

Objectives - This study aimed to identify: (i) the current research trends related to mobility assistants to support multi-modal routes in smart cities; (ii) the types of smart cities’ data being used; (iii) the methods applied to assess the proposed solutions; and iv) the major barriers for their dissemination. Methods - An electronic search was conducted in several databases, combining relevant keywords. Then titles and abstracts were screened against inclusion and exclusion criteria. Finally, the full texts of the eligible articles were retrieved and screened for inclusion. Results - A total of 19 articles were included. These articles either propose algorithms to optimize routes planning or presenting specific applications that make use of a broad range of smart cities’ data. Conclusion - The number of included articles is very reduced when compared with the total number of articles related to smart cities, which means that the mobility assistants to support multi-modal routes are still not significant within the smart cities’ research. Moreover, most of the included articles report applications in an early stage of development, which is a major barrier for the respective dissemination.


CJEM ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 920-928 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle K. Kelton ◽  
Adam Szulewski ◽  
Daniel Howes

AbstractObjectivesTo collect and synthesize the literature describing the use of real-time video-based technologies to provide support in the care of patients presenting to emergency departments.Data SourceSix electronic databases were searched, including Medline, CINAHL, Embase, the Cochrane Database, DARE, and PubMed for all publications since the earliest date available in each database to February 2016.Study SelectionSelected articles were full text articles addressing the use of telemedicine to support patient care in pre-hospital or emergency department settings. The search yielded 2976 articles for review with 11 studies eligible for inclusion after application of the inclusion and exclusion criteria. A scoping review of the selected articles was performed to better understand the different systems in place around the world and the current state of evidence supporting telemedicine use in the emergency department.ConclusionsTelemedicine support for emergency department physicians is an application with significant potential but is still lacking evidence supporting improved patient outcomes. Advances in technology, combined with more attractive price-points have resulted in widespread interest and implementation around the world. Applications of this technology that are currently being studied include support for minor treatment centres, patient transfer decision-making, management of acutely ill patients and scheduled teleconsultations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie J.M. Watzlaf ◽  
Leming Zhou ◽  
Dilhari R. DeAlmeida ◽  
Linda M. Hartman

The objective of this systematic review was to systematically review papers in the United States that examine current practices in privacy and security when telehealth technologies are used by healthcare providers. A literature search was conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Protocols (PRISMA-P). PubMed, CINAHL and INSPEC from 2003 – 2016 were searched and returned 25,404 papers (after duplications were removed). Inclusion and exclusion criteria were strictly followed to examine title, abstract, and full text for 21 published papers which reported on privacy and security practices used by healthcare providers using telehealth.  Data on confidentiality, integrity, privacy, informed consent, access control, availability, retention, encryption, and authentication were all searched and retrieved from the papers examined. Papers were selected by two independent reviewers, first per inclusion/exclusion criteria and, where there was disagreement, a third reviewer was consulted. The percentage of agreement and Cohen’s kappa was 99.04% and 0.7331 respectively. The papers reviewed ranged from 2004 to 2016 and included several types of telehealth specialties. Sixty-seven percent were policy type studies, and 14 percent were survey/interview studies. There were no randomized controlled trials. Based upon the results, we conclude that it is necessary to have more studies with specific information about the use of privacy and security practices when using telehealth technologies as well as studies that examine patient and provider preferences on how data is kept private and secure during and after telehealth sessions.Keywords: Computer security, Health personnel, Privacy, Systematic review, Telehealth 


Author(s):  
Mirjana Maksimović

Nowhere do the technology advancements bring improvements than in the healthcare sector, constantly creating new healthcare applications and systems which completely revolutionize the healthcare domain. The appearance of Internet of Things (IoT) based healthcare systems has immensely improved quality and delivery of care, and significantly reduced the costs. At the same time, these systems generate the enormous amount of health-associated data which has to be properly gathered, analyzed and shared. The smart devices, as the components of IoT-driven healthcare systems, are not able to deal with IoT-produced data, neither data posting to the Cloud is the appropriate solution. To overcome smart devices’ and Cloud’s limitations the new paradigm, known as Fog computing, has appeared, where an additional layer processes the data and sends the results to the Cloud. Despite numerous benefits Fog computing brings into IoT-based environments, the privacy and security issues remain the main challenge for its implementation. The reasons for integrating the IoT-based healthcare system and Fog computing, benefits and challenges, as well as the proposition of simple low-cost system are presented in this paper.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. e455
Author(s):  
Mohammed Amine Bouras ◽  
Boming Xia ◽  
Adnan Omer Abuassba ◽  
Huansheng Ning ◽  
Qinghua Lu

Access control is a critical aspect for improving the privacy and security of IoT systems. A consortium is a public or private association or a group of two or more institutes, businesses, and companies that collaborate to achieve common goals or form a resource pool to enable the sharing economy aspect. However, most access control methods are based on centralized solutions, which may lead to problems like data leakage and single-point failure. Blockchain technology has its intrinsic feature of distribution, which can be used to tackle the centralized problem of traditional access control schemes. Nevertheless, blockchain itself comes with certain limitations like the lack of scalability and poor performance. To bridge the gap of these problems, here we present a decentralized capability-based access control architecture designed for IoT consortium networks named IoT-CCAC. A blockchain-based database is utilized in our solution for better performance since it exhibits favorable features of both blockchain and conventional databases. The performance of IoT-CCAC is evaluated to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed architecture. IoT-CCAC is a secure, salable, effective solution that meets the enterprise and business’s needs and adaptable for different IoT interoperability scenarios.


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