Blockchain and AI-Based Solutions to Combat Coronavirus (COVID-19)-like Epidemics: A Survey

Abstract

The beginning of 2020 has seen the emergence of coronavirus outbreak caused by a novel virus called SARS-CoV-2. The sudden explosion and uncontrolled worldwide spread of COVID-19 show the limitations of existing healthcare systems to timely handle public health emergencies. In such contexts, innovative technologies such as blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have emerged as promising solutions for fighting coronavirus epidemic. On the one hand, blockchain can combat pandemics by enabling early detection of outbreaks, protecting user privacy, and ensuring reliable medical supply chain during the outbreak tracking. On the other hand, AI provides intelligent solutions for identifying symptoms caused by coronavirus for treatments and supporting drug manufacturing. Motivated by these, in this paper we present an extensive survey on the use of blockchain and AI for combating coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemics based on the rapidly emerging literature. First, we introduce a new conceptual architecture which integrates blockchain and AI specific for COVID-19 fighting. Particularly, we highlight the key solutions that blockchain and AI can provide to combat the COVID-19 outbreak. Then, we survey the latest research efforts on the use of blockchain and AI for COVID-19 fighting in a wide range of applications. The newly emerging projects and use cases enabled by these technologies to deal with coronavirus pandemic are also presented. Finally, we point out challenges and future directions that motivate more research efforts to deal with future coronavirus-like epidemics.

Blockchain and COVID-19 Pandemic: Applications and Challenges

“…The scarcity of medical supplies and hospital capacity has forced government authorities to impose partial or complete lockdown to contain the spread of the infection. Prevention from the adversarial effects due to the spread of COVID-19 requires coordinated action and collaboration among the health professionals, authorities, research institutes, and government [1,2,6]. However, the legacy information management systems being used to store crucial COVID-19 related data are mostly disintegrated.…”

“…Blockchain is a distributed, decentralized, and immutable record of transactions that are stored on a distributed network of nodes over geographically dispersed locations [6]. The decentralization feature of blockchain technology provides high security and robustness to the data and transactions stored on the blockchain with no possibilities of a single point of failure attack.…”

“…The decentralization feature of blockchain technology provides high security and robustness to the data and transactions stored on the blockchain with no possibilities of a single point of failure attack. The record of transactions and data stored on the blockchain is transparent to each member in the network that brings trust in reliability and availability of data [6,[14][15][16]. The transparency of blockchain-based records is achieved through a decentralized consensus protocol that defines rules for assuring the agreement of all miners on the current status of blockchain.…”

“…In general, blockchain platforms are categorized as permissionless or permissioned blockchain. Any user can join, make transactions, and involve in the mining process on the permissionless blockchain platform [6,18]. Nevertheless, permissioned blockchain [19] is an invitation-only network that is usually managed by a single organization.…”

“…Nevertheless, permissioned blockchain [19] is an invitation-only network that is usually managed by a single organization. Access privileges to transact on a permissioned blockchain are limited to members of the organization only [6,15,16,20,21].…”