FoG-Care: a fog computing and blockchain architecture for global sharing of healthcare data

Abstract

Due to recent advances in distributed systems and healthcare, patient data can be dispersed in distant locations. However, processing and transmission errors are more likely to occur as data sets become larger and more complex. Several solutions based on Cloud Computing have been proposed to manage health data. These solutions present many healthcare implementation challenges, such as scalability, data privacy, and global patient identification. Thus, Fog Computing and Blockchain present themselves as an alternative to reduce the complexity of managing health data and increase its reliability. Therefore, the main challenge to be faced is how health services can benefit from a computational architecture that supports standards for the global identification of assets and sharing of geographically distributed information, considering scalability, latency, and privacy. The scientific contribution is to propose an architectural model based on Blockchain and Fog Computing that meets these requirements and eventual limitations. The methodology consists of proposing and implementing a prototype of a healthcare software architecture called Fog-Care, evaluating performance metrics such as latency, throughput, and sending rate of blockchain smart contracts in a healthcare scenario of a global vaccination campaign. This software includes a globally unique identity model called ID-Care, which supports the global identification of unique individuals with various combinations of documents, biometrics, and the GS1 healthcare industry standard. The assessment is a use-case scenario based on an integrated vaccination campaign in the top 5 most visited tourist destinations globally. The performance evaluation demonstrated that the minimum latency takes less than 1 second to run, and this metric’s average grows linearly. Also, the average latency of transactions is just a few seconds; even 100 simultaneous requests per peer are considered. Thus, its data-sharing issues of privacy and identification and the use of a model for a global id for healthcare can help reduce costs, time, and efforts, especially in the context of health threats, Where agility and financial support must be prioritized. From the results, It is crucial to add more fog nodes, like one per state to support the increase of demand of transactions in a blockchain with comprehensive nodes dispersed, to support scalability; as the send rate increases, approximately half of the transactions are processed at that time, according to the throughput results; privacy can be supported and treated globally with blockchain with the writing of blockchain smart contracts that represent these features; the no mutation and integrity of the ledger in a healthcare global environment can help to protect the privacy of the patients; the unique and global identification of persons and resources is necessary and can be made with GS1 Standards properly; the use of a global identification architecture for health can generate several valuable suggestions in public health policies depending on the specifics of each country and the health data shared with the participants, being possible to implement better political decision-making and a more global coordinated healthcare strategy with faster and earlier results available.