Blockchain for COVID-19: Review, Opportunities, and a Trusted Tracking System

Abstract

The sudden development of the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the limitations in modern healthcare systems to handle public health emergencies. It is evident that adopting innovative technologies such as blockchain can help in effective planning operations and resource deployments. Blockchain technology can play an important role in the healthcare sector, such as improved clinical trial data management by reducing delays in regulatory approvals, and streamline the communication between diverse stakeholders of the supply chain, etc. Moreover, the spread of misinformation has intensely increased during the outbreak, and existing platforms lack the ability to validate the authenticity of data, leading to public panic and irrational behavior. Thus, developing a blockchain-based tracking system is important to ensure that the information received by the public and government agencies is reliable and trustworthy. In this paper, we review various blockchain applications and opportunities in combating the COVID-19 pandemic and develop a tracking system for the COVID-19 data collected from various external sources. We propose, implement, and evaluate a blockchain-based system using Ethereum smart contracts and oracles to track reported data related to the number of new cases, deaths, and recovered cases obtained from trusted sources. We present detailed algorithms that capture the interactions between stakeholders in the network. We present security analysis and the cost incurred by the stakeholders, and we highlight the challenges and future directions of our work. Our work demonstrates that the proposed solution is economically feasible and ensures data integrity, security, transparency, data traceability among stakeholders.

Blockchain, Self-Sovereign Identity and Digital Credentials: Promise Versus Praxis in Education

“…In troubled times like today with severely contracted economic activity leading to large scale job losses 37 , blockchain-backed educational credentials could ultimately create access to job opportunities which would otherwise go unacknowledged. It might be possible to directly impact an individual's ability to find employment; for example, recruitment sites could match vacancies to candidates based on a broader range of experiences as reflected in their student experience collected from a multitude of resources (Kalla et al, 2020;Marbouh et al, 2020).…”

Blockchain Platform For COVID-19 Vaccine Supply Management

“…Blockchain based decentralized systems for addressing healthcare sector problems such as privacy and confidentiality of data are presented in [25], [26]. Recent studies have pointed the possibilities of using blockchain in combating the COVID-19 pandemic most of them addressing the decentralized tracking of contracts and symptoms or for assuring security and immutability [27]. Relevant use cases for blockchain technology in managing COVID-19 pandemic contact tracing, patient data sharing, supply chain management are overviewed in [28].…”

“…The vaccine lots are assigned to freezing devices, this association being updated during the distribution chain enacting its decentralized tracing (see lines 9-18). Each time a monitored value associated with a freezing device is provided it is checked against the imposed rules (line [26][27][28][29].…”

“…Even though blocking technology has some relevant features in addressing all the three critical aspects for implementing a successful immunization campaign, very few approaches can be found in the literature. Moreover, most of the blockchain solutions proposed to manage the COVID-19 vaccine supply chain are in the early phase of design studies [27], [37], or are viewpoints from blockchain companies or stakeholders [41], [46], [47].…”

Test, Trace, and Put on the Blockchain?: A Viewpoint Evaluating the Use of Decentralized Systems for Algorithmic Contact Tracing to Combat a Global Pandemic

“…Blockchain has also been suggested as a potential solution in the context of COVID-19 algorithmic contact tracing by promising protection from cyberattacks [23], allowing for global monitoring of social encounters to inform health policies [24], enabling privacy [25,26], preventing the falsification of diagnoses [27], allowing users to retain ownership of personal data [28], and ensuring the trustworthiness of that data [29], while maintaining a record of its provenance [26]. While none of the popular algorithmic contact tracing frameworks on the market today [30] uses blockchain, the growing number of academic works [23,25,27,[31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] suggests significant interest.…”