Protecting the Privacy of IoMT-Based Health Records Using Blockchain Technology

Internet of medical things (IoMT) has become one of the revolutionary technology nowadays due to wide spread use of IoT in healthcare applications. IoMT improves the human–machine interaction enhancing the instantaneous monitoring of patient’s health and also involves patients in making decisions. So, the current medical devices have to be transformed into IoMT-based medical devices to collect patient information instantaneously. The patient’s health-related information can be observed from remote location without any need to go to hospital, and this data can be processed and is sent to mediators for further use. So, we are in need of technology that secures the confidentiality of the health information of patients. Blockchain is one such technology that helps in securing privacy of patient’s health-related data. Blockchain technique uses a sequence of blocks comprising the block ID, previous block ID, and the transactions. The preceding block ID can be used to maintain a link between subsequent blocks. These links continue until the first block is reached. This ID contains hash in blocks, and this hash is appended to subsequent blocks in chain. Any modifications to the patient information in a block will change the subsequent blocks in the chain also. So, changes to the data made by a hacker will become impossible. It uses public key cryptography for performing transactions between nodes. So, use of such type of cryptographic hash technique and chain formation for the blocks guarantees the security and privacy of the patient’s health information or records.