Remote Health Monitoring (RHM) is going to reinvent the future healthcare industry and bring about abundant value to hospitals, doctors, and patients by overcoming the many challenges currently being faced in monitoring patient’s well-being, promoting preventive care, and managing the quality of drugs and equipment. Despite the many benefits of RHM, it is yet to be widely deployed due to the healthcare data security and privacy challenges. Healthcare data are highly sensitive and require fail-safe measures against unauthorized data access, leakages, and manipulations, and as such, there are stringent regulations governing how healthcare data can be secured, communicated, and stored, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The challenges and regulatory demands in RHM applications can be addressed using blockchain technology due to its distinguishing features of decentralization, immutability, and transparency to address the challenges of data security and privacy. This article will provide a systematic review on the use of blockchain in RHM, focusing primarily on data security and privacy.

BACKGROUND Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is going to reinvent the future healthcare industry and bring abundant value to hospitals, doctors and patients by overcoming the many challenges currently being faced in monitoring individual’s wellbeing, promoting preventive care, and managing quality of drugs and equipment. Despite the many benefits of RHM, it is yet to be widely adopted and deployed due to the healthcare data security and privacy challenges. The healthcare data is highly sensitive and requires fail-safe measures against unauthorized data access, leaks and manipulations. There are stringent regulations governing how the healthcare data can be secured, communicated and stored such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). These challenges and regulatory demands in the RHM applications can be addressed using blockchain technology due to its distinguishing features of decentralization, immutability and transparency thereby addressing the challenges of security and privacy. This article provides a systematic review of the use of blockchain in RHM focusing on security and privacy. OBJECTIVE To systematically review the available literature on Remote Health Monitoring focusing on security and privacy with special focus on Blockchain. METHODS A systematic search was conducted across Arxiv, IEEE and Medrxiv to identify literatures across three areas which are remote health monitoring, remote health monitoring focusing on security and privacy and remote health monitoring focusing with blockchain. A total of 6516 references from all the publication hits were screened, 152 papers were retrieved for full text analysis after eliminating duplicates and irrelevant ones, 71 relevant papers are documented as part of this study. RESULTS In this survey paper, we conducted a comprehensive review of the blockchain-based RHM systems. It is clear by analyzing these studies that public blockchains still have several limitations, but in comparison private blockchain models can overcome security and privacy concerns. However, the private blockchains have the issue of a single point of failure that needs to be addressed. CONCLUSIONS The utilization of blockchain for RHM Use cases has many benefits for the patients’ healthcare professionals, and related stakeholders. However, security and privacy should be addressed to make RHM successful.