The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a new technology that enables both virtual and physical objects to be connected and communicate with each other, and produce new digitized services that improve our quality of life. The IoT system provides several advantages, however, the current centralized architecture introduces numerous issues involving a single point of failure, security, privacy, transparency, and data integrity. These challenges are an obstacle in the way of the future developments of IoT applications. Moving the IoT into one of the distributed ledger technologies may be the correct choice to resolve these issues. Among the common and popular types of distributed ledger technologies is the blockchain. Integrating the IoT with blockchain technology can bring countless benefits. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive discussion of integrating the IoT system with blockchain technology. After providing the basics of the IoT system and blockchain technology, a thorough review of integrating the blockchain with the IoT system is presented by highlighting benefits of the integration and how the blockchain can resolve the issues of the IoT system. Then, the blockchain as a service for the IoT is presented to show how various features of blockchain technology can be implemented as a service for various IoT applications. This is followed by discussing the impact of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) on both IoT and blockchain. In the end, future research directions of IoT with blockchain are presented.

The healthcare sector is suffering from inefficiencies in handling its data. Many patients and healthcare organisations are frustrated by the numerous hurdles to obtaining current, real-time patient information. Patients are also frustrated at trying to schedule appointments at health organisations that have outdated contact information. The healthcare sector's attention has been drawn to blockchain technology as a part of the solution, especially since this technology has been successfully applied in the financial sector to improve the security of transactions. The aspect of interoperability is resolved adequately by blockchain technology, because it has the potential to store, manage and share EMRs safely in the healthcare community. Therefore, the technology is having a positive impact on healthcare outcomes for various stakeholders. Interoperability in healthcare eases the exchange of health-related data, such as EMRs, between healthcare entities so that records may be shared and distributed among clinical systems. To handle data in this sector without violating privacy is a challenge, whether in the collection, storage, or analysis. Poor security, which increases data breaches, endangers patients both mentally, socially, and financially. A lack of data-sharing in the healthcare sector is considered a significant issue worldwide. This research focuses on this gap by investigating the benefits of using blockchain at the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia, providing a detailed analysis of the healthcare sector, and evaluating how blockchain technology improves data-sharing security. This research proposes a framework that identifies the factors supporting data-sharing using blockchain among healthcare organisations. It has three categories: healthcare systems factors; security factors; and blockchain factors. A triangulation technique achieved reliable results in three steps: a literature review; an expert review; and a questionnaire. This gave a comprehensive picture of the research topic, validating and confirming the results. To construct the framework, factors were comprehensively extracted from the literature then analysed, cleared of duplicates, and categorised. As a result, the final framework is confirmed as being based on the literature and expert review, and it is supported by the practitioners' survey.

The healthcare data are considered as a highly valuable source of information that can improve healthcare systems to be more intelligent and improve the quality of the provided services. However, due to security and privacy issues, sharing data between healthcare organisations is challenging. This has led to data shortage in the healthcare sector which is considered as a significant issue not only in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) but also worldwide. The primary objective of conducting this paper is to investigate the various factors that enable secure sharing and exchange of healthcare information between different healthcare providers in the KSA. It starts by discussing the current literature and frameworks for managing healthcare data information and the challenges that health providers encounter, particularly when it comes to issues such as data security, patient privacy, and healthcare information exchange. These challenges in managing healthcare data have necessitated the need for implementing a solution that can allow medical providers to have access to updated healthcare information. Attention in the healthcare sector has been drawn to blockchain technology as a part of the solution, especially after the technology was successfully applied in the financial sector to improve the security of financial transactions, particularly involving digital currencies such as Bitcoin. Therefore, a framework based on the blockchain technology has been proposed to achieve the goals of the present research.