Blockchain for COVID-19: Review, Opportunites and a Trusted Tracking
System
- Dounia Marbouh ,
- Tayaba Abbasi ,
- Fatema Maasmi ,
- Ilhaam Omar ,
- Mazin Debe ,
- Khaled Salah ,
- Raja Jayaraman ,
- Samer Ellahham
Raja Jayaraman
Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Khalifa University of Science and Technology
Corresponding Author:[email protected]
Author ProfileAbstract
The sudden development of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the limitations
in modern healthcare systems to handle public health emergencies. It is
evident that adopting innovative technologies such as blockchain can
help in effective planning operations and resource deployments.
Blockchain technology can play an important role in the healthcare
sector such as improved clinical trial data management by reducing
delays in regulatory approvals, streamline the communication between
diverse stakeholders of the supply chain etc. Moreover, the spread of
misinformation has intensely increased during the outbreak and existing
platforms lack the ability to validate the authenticity of data, causing
people to panic and act irrationally. Thus, developing a
blockchain-based tracking system is important to ensure that the
information received by the public and government agencies are reliable
and trustworthy. In this paper, we focus on blockchain abilities to
track the COVID-19 data collected from various sources including news,
healthcare professionals, researchers etc, verify and append them in a
secure and trusted distributed ledger. Thus, we propose a generic
framework using Ethereum smart contracts and oracles to track real-time
data related to the number of new cases, deaths and recovered cases
obtained from trusted sources. We present detailed algorithms that
capture the interactions between stakeholders in the network. The smart
contract code was developed and tested in Remix environment. We present
the cost and security analysis incurred by the stakeholders and
highlight the challenges and future directions of our work. Our work
demonstrates that the proposed solution is economically feasible and
ensures data integrity, security, transparency, data traceability among
stakeholders.