Medical IoT devices that use miniature sensors to collect patient’s bio-signals and connected medical applications are playing a crucial role in providing pervasive and personalized healthcare. This technological improvement has also created opportunities for the better management of personal health information. The Personal Health Information Management System (PHIMS) supports activities such as acquisition, storage, organization, integration, and privacy-sensitive retrieval of consumer’s health information. For usability and wide acceptance, the PHIMS should follow the design principles that guarantee privacy-aware health information sharing, individual information control, integration of information obtained from multiple medical IoT devices, health information security, and flexibility. Recently, blockchain technology has emerged as a lucrative option for the management of personal health information. In this paper, we propose eHealthChain—a blockchain-based PHIMS for managing health data originating from medical IoT devices and connected applications. The eHealthChain architecture consists of four layers, which are a blockchain layer for hosting a blockchain database, an IoT device layer for obtaining personal health data, an application layer for facilitating health data sharing, and an adapter layer, which interfaces the blockchain layer with an application layer. Compared to existing systems, eHealthChain provides complete control to the user in terms of personal health data acquisition, sharing, and self-management. We also present a detailed implementation of a Proof of Concept (PoC) prototype of eHealthChain system built using Hyperledger Fabric platform.

使用微型传感器收集患者生物信号和连接医疗应用的医疗物联网设备在提供普遍和个性化的医疗保健方面发挥着至关重要的作用。这种技术进步也为更好地管理个人健康信息创造了机会。个人健康信息管理系统 (PHIMS) 支持消费者健康信息的获取、存储、组织、集成和对隐私敏感的检索等活动。为了可用性和广泛接受性，PHIMS 应遵循保证隐私感知健康信息共享、个人信息控制、从多个医疗物联网设备获得的信息集成、健康信息安全和灵活性的设计原则。最近，区块链技术已成为管理个人健康信息的一种有利可图的选择。在本文中，我们提出了 eHealthChain——一种基于区块链的 PHIMS，用于管理源自医疗物联网设备和连接应用程序的健康数据。eHealthChain 架构由四层组成，分别是用于托管区块链数据库的区块链层、用于获取个人健康数据的物联网设备层、用于促进健康数据共享的应用层以及将区块链层与应用层。与现有系统相比，eHealthChain在个人健康数据的获取、共享和自我管理方面为用户提供了完全的控制。