Sharing Health and Wellness Data with Blockchain and Smart Contracts

Abstract

Increased longevity and people's concern about aging with quality has led to increased health and wellness data. Much of the data is not interoperable because of its divergent structures and semantics, being little used and little protected. Existing standards are complex and lack the adherence of the agents involved to ensure their application. Blockchain technology offers alternatives to unify the standards and their application by consensus algorithm, which considers the validation and secrecy in the insertion of the blocks of transactions in the chain. However, smart contracts can ensure secrecy and the rules of data sharing in blocks in the chain. In this paper, we propose a blockchain architecture that considers data collected in the health and wellness ecosystem, including those obtained by IoT devices and persisted in middleware platforms. It is intended that this architecture be able to answer the questions and establish the concepts for the full and secure sharing of health and wellness data.