hQChain: Leveraging Towards Blockchain and Queueing Model for Secure Smart Connected Health

Introduction

Blockchain provides an anonymous, accountable, authentic, consistent, decentralized and persistent approach for consensus impelled interaction amidst numerous entities through its distributed ledger (Carlozo, 2017). It has already revolutionized people’s living standards by its immense impact on financial sectors, agriculture, transportation, healthcare and so on. Blockchain first came into limelight since the inception of Bitcoin by Santoshi Nakamoto (Nakamoto, 2008). It is essentially tampered proof as data is recorded in form of blocks and each block holds the corresponding data as well as the cryptographic hash of its preceding block. Figure 1 illustrates the same. If any unauthorised amendment is made on any block, its hash immediately changes and hence there is a hash mismatch with its successor and the tampered block can be easily recognized.

Figure 1.

Block diagram of a Blockchain

Blockchain is widely used to enhance the security in several components of a smart city. Smart city is a signification bestowed to a city that ingests current information and communication technologies (ICT) to boost the quality of life for its dwellers (Deakin and Waer, 2011). Healthcare is treated as the preeminent fundamental facility and a city where hale and hearty citizens inhabit is equitable in every scenario. As a result of this, over the years, several researchers are inclined to work in the domain of smart health. Figure 2 gives the worldwide last five years comparison of Google Trends interest in Smart City and Smart Health. Due to its fundamental features, Blockchain based Healthcare is also garnering interest of researchers as illustrated in Figure 3.

Figure 2.

Google Trends Smart City and Smart Health Comparison

Figure 3.

Google Trends Smart Health and Blockchain in Healthcare Comparison

Figure 4.

Major Healthcare Goals

Figure 4 represents the major healthcare goals:

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  Disease Prevention: Disease prevention is a practice by which patients, specifically those with huge risk factors, are continually supervised and evaluated to foil the ailment from arising. Thus, the cure kickstarts even before symptoms of the disease, or shortly thereafter. To accomplish this possible, the patient has to be monitored regularly. It thus requires persistent fitness check-ups, activity surveillance and analysis, disease prognosis etc.

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  Disease Diagnosis: After patient shows certain symptoms of disorder, these need to be properly diagnosed to provide the best treatment. Diagnosis involves initial and detailed assessment by studying the patient history, evaluation of his major complaints and symptoms, prescribing certain medical tests. After the tests are conducted, the performance of the patient, interpretation of the outcomes is vital.

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  Disease Treatment: Physician or specialist check-ups, follow-ups, conduct of medical procedures like surgery etc, patient being admitted to the hospital and his successive discharge and further consultations, proper medicines being prescribed play an important agenda in the course of the entire treatment.