Health-BlockEdge: Blockchain-Edge Framework for Reliable Low-Latency Digital Healthcare Applications

Abstract

The rapid evolution of technology allows the healthcare sector to adopt intelligent, context-aware, secure, and ubiquitous healthcare services. Together with the global trend of an aging population, it has become highly important to propose value-creating, yet cost-efficient digital solutions for healthcare systems. These solutions should provide effective means of healthcare services in both the hospital and home care scenarios. In this paper, we focused on the latter case, where the goal was to provide easy-to-use, reliable, and secure remote monitoring and aid for elderly persons at their home. We proposed a framework to integrate the capabilities of edge computing and blockchain technology to address some of the key requirements of smart remote healthcare systems, such as long operating times, low cost, resilience to network problems, security, and trust in highly dynamic network conditions. In order to assess the feasibility of our approach, we evaluated the performance of our framework in terms of latency, power consumption, network utilization, and computational load, compared to a scenario where no blockchain was used.

Distributed network and service architecture for future digital healthcare

“…We started by introducing our conceptual nanoEdge service model for enabling efficient distributed local edge computing. Then we presented the results of our study related to dynamic resource-aware service orchestration [29] and the integration of Blockchain with Edge Computing for achieving sufficient level of privacy and trust between various stakeholders of distributed e-health and e-welfare services [30]. As the fourth contribution, we proposed and simulated an algorithm for edge-cloud orchestration to minimize the usage of system resources, while maximizing the number of accepted latency-limited task requests [31], which is especially important latency and mission-critical medical applications, such as surgical navigation.…”

“…Similarly, when moved to a hospital, the patient treatment service would be further extended with hospital instrumentation. Blockchain edge architecture: In [30], we studied the integration of BC with EC for enabling secure and trusted distributed telemedicine services. The proposed approach improves data privacy protection by 1) limiting the propagation of sensitive data instead of sending all data to the cloud, and 2) enabling the local anonymization of data that need to be sent for processing at public servers.…”

“…-to-end latency with different algorithm deployment options[30] b) Power consumption[30] c) Network usage[30] d) Number of operations executed[30] …”

IoT-Enabled Remote Monitoring Techniques for Healthcare Applications -- An Overview

“…The authors revealed the scalable feature of clouds which improved the round-time of sensor applications. Also, authors of [45] discussed how low-latency could be improved in healthcare applications when edge devices were included in the monitoring system.…”

A Method for Medical Data Analysis Using the LogNNet for Clinical Decision Support Systems and Edge Computing in Healthcare

“…If the Internet connection with the fog and cloud servers fails, local intelligent processing helps to make a decision to solve the problem on the spot. The number of approaches to organize computing include the edge–cloud IoT model, the local edge–cloud IoT model [ 11 ], nanoEdge [ 12 ], and the software-defined network controller in the edge server [ 10 ]. Edge computing increases the efficiency of resources that are used by reducing the amount of data transferred between end systems and centralized cloud servers [ 9 ].…”