Blockchain for COVID-19: Review, Opportunites and a Trusted
Tracking System
Dounia Marbouh1,Tayaba Abbasi2,
Fatema Maasmi2, Ilhaam A. Omar1,
Mazin S. Debe2, Khaled Salah2, Raja
Jayaraman1 and Samer Ellahham3
1 Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering,
Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi 127788, United Arab Emirates
2 Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering,
Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi 127788, United Arab Emirates
3 Heart & Vascular Institute, Cleveland Clinic Abu
Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Corresponding author: Khaled Salah (e-mail:
khaled.salah@ku.ac.ae)
Abstract— 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.
Keywords—Blockchain, COVID-19, Coronavirus, Ethereum, Trusted Oracles,
Smart Contracts, Traceability, Tracking System, Transparency.