Blockchain enabled Ambient Assisted living for Critically ill Patients
Vibha Nehra, Udit Rungta, Basudha Choudhury · 2021
The blockchain technology of the 4thindustrial revolution was introduced to fundamentally change the online world by moving the entire system to a decentralized platform instead of the prevailing centralized system. It is an equitable system where the data is open to everyone thus any technology that makes use of blockchain framework retains lucidity thus making it hassle-free for its customers. The most popular implementation of blockchain technology, bitcoin is famous for its security and privacy, attributed to its proof of work mining algorithm. On the other hand, its enormous energy consumption hampers its implementation in resource-restrained IoT applications. While the traditional blockchain operation demands a solely dedicated mining machine, contrarily, IoT devices seems not capable enough to entertain the high cost, value, and validity of the blockchain domain. Therefore, some simplification in the maximum energy-consuming part of the blockchain which is the mining process is required to be done. This work implements a simplified energy-efficient blockchain for ambient assisted living applications notably for critically ill patients. It collects data from five digital sensors on a single board computer for a medical facility, which computes PoW for up to a particular level of difficulty as allowed by available computation power. The emulation results obtained on comparison of the recommended blockchain with respect to traditional blockchain exhibit that simplified blockchain implementation is energy efficient in the terms of computation time and more pertinent to the resource-constrained IoT domain.