A look into the future of blockchain technology
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Levis D
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8598042 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Since blockchain was introduced through Bitcoin, research has been ongoing to extend its applications to non-financial use cases. Healthcare is one industry in which blockchain is expected to have significant impacts. Research in this area is relatively new but growing rapidly; so, health informatics researchers and practitioners are always struggling to keep pace with research progress in this area. This paper reports on a systematic review of the ongoing research in the application of blockchain technology in healthcare. The research methodology is based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines and a systematic mapping study process, in which a well-designed search protocol is used to search four scientific databases, to identify, extract and analyze all relevant publications. The review shows that a number of studies have proposed different use cases for the application of blockchain in healthcare; however, there is a lack of adequate prototype implementations and studies to characterize the effectiveness of these proposed use cases. The review further highlights the state-of-the-art in the development of blockchain applications for healthcare, their limitations and the areas for future research. To this end, therefore, there is still the need for more research to better understand, characterize and evaluate the utility of blockchain in healthcare.
| S-EPMC6627742 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BACKGROUND:Digital health technologies, including telemedicine, mobile health (mHealth), and remote monitoring, are playing a greater role in medical practice. Safe and accurate management of medical information leads to the advancement of digital health, which in turn results in a number of beneficial effects. Furthermore, mHealth can help lower costs by facilitating the delivery of care and connecting people to their health care providers. Mobile apps help empower patients and health care providers to proactively address medical conditions through near real-time monitoring and treatment, regardless of the location of the patient or the health care provider. Additionally, mHealth data are stored in servers, and consequently, data management that prevents all forms of manipulation is crucial for both medical practice and clinical trials. OBJECTIVE:The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate a tamper-resistant mHealth system using blockchain technology, which enables trusted and auditable computing using a decentralized network. METHODS:We developed an mHealth system for cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia using a smartphone app. The volunteer data collected with the app were stored in JavaScript Object Notation format and sent to the blockchain network. Thereafter, we evaluated the tamper resistance of the data against the inconsistencies caused by artificial faults. RESULTS:Electronic medical records collected using smartphones were successfully sent to a private Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network. We verified the data update process under conditions where all the validating peers were running normally. The mHealth data were successfully updated under network faults. We further ensured that any electronic health record registered to the blockchain network was resistant to tampering and revision. The mHealth data update was compatible with tamper resistance in the blockchain network. CONCLUSIONS:Blockchain serves as a tamperproof system for mHealth. Combining mHealth with blockchain technology may provide a novel solution that enables both accessibility and data transparency without a third party such as a contract research organization.
| S-EPMC5550736 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BACKGROUND:Blockchain offers a promising new distributed technology to address the challenges of data standardization, system interoperability, security, privacy, and accessibility of medical records. OBJECTIVE:The purpose of this review is to assess the research on the use of blockchain technology for patient care and the associated challenges and to provide a research agenda for future research. METHODS:This review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis guidelines. We queried the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), PubMed, Excerpta Medica dataBASE (EMBASE), and Web of Science databases for peer-reviewed research articles published up to December 2019 that examined the implementation of blockchain technology in health care settings. We identified 800 articles from which we selected 70 empirical research articles for a detailed review. RESULTS:Blockchain-based patient care applications include medical information systems, personal health records, mobile health and telemedicine, data preservation systems and social networks, health information exchanges and remote monitoring systems, and medical research systems. These blockchain-based health care applications may improve patient engagement and empowerment, improve health care provider access to information, and enhance the use of health care information for medical research. CONCLUSIONS:Blockchain health information technology (HIT) provides benefits such as ensuring data privacy and security of health data, facilitating interoperability of heterogeneous HIT systems, and improving the quality of health care outcomes. However, barriers to using blockchain technology to build HIT include security and privacy vulnerabilities, user resistance, high computing power requirements and implementation costs, inefficient consensus algorithms, and challenges of integrating blockchain with existing HIT. With 51% of the research focused on medical information systems such as electronic health record and electronic medical record, and 53% of the research focused on data security and privacy issues, this review shows that HIT research is primarily focused on the use of blockchain technologies to address the current challenges HIT faces. Although Blockchain presents significant potential for disrupting health care, most ideas are in their infancy.
| S-EPMC7399962 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Patient recruitment for clinical trials is known to be a challenging aspect of clinical research. There are multiple competing concerns from the sponsor, patient and principal investigator's perspectives resulting in most clinical trials not meeting recruitment requirements on time. Conducting under-enrolled clinical trials affects the power of conclusive results or causes premature trial termination. The Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology originally applied in the financial sector. Its features as a peer-to-peer system with publicly audited transactions, data security, and patient privacy are a good fit for the needs of clinical trials recruitment. The "Smart Contract" is a programmable self-executing protocol that regulates the blockchain transactions. Given current recruitment challenges, we have proposed a blockchain model containing multiple trial-based contracts for trial management and patient engagement and a master smart contract for automated subject matching, patient recruitment, and trial-based contracts management.
| S-EPMC7153067 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This study explores the factors influencing the intention to adopt blockchain technology and the alignment between respondents' work characteristics and blockchain technology. It addresses the lack of attention from previous literature on these factors in the context of blockchain adoption, especially amidst the recent blockchain hype. By integrating Task-Technology Fit (TTF) and a modified version of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), this study employs a questionnaire survey. The results demonstrate that the alignment between blockchain and work characteristics significantly impacts performance expectations and the recognition of opportunities, thereby influencing the intention to adopt blockchain. Furthermore, factors such as effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, and perceived policy uncertainty influence adoption intention by identifying opportunities. Exposure to blockchain-related knowledge reinforces the relationships mentioned above. Additionally, digital natives display greater confidence in blockchain's potential to enhance work performance than digital immigrants. These study findings offer valuable insights and strategies for blockchain technology providers and provide a comprehensive survey for individuals and professionals interested in embracing or understanding the dynamics of blockchain adoption.
| S-EPMC10682616 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundOne of the most promising health care development areas is introducing telemedicine services and creating solutions based on blockchain technology. The study of systems combining both these domains indicates the ongoing expansion of digital technologies in this market segment.ObjectiveThis paper aims to review the feasibility of blockchain technology for telemedicine.MethodsThe authors identified relevant studies via systematic searches of databases including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, and Google Scholar. The suitability of each for inclusion in this review was assessed independently. Owing to the lack of publications, available blockchain-based tokens were discovered via conventional web search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Yandex).ResultsOf the 40 discovered projects, only 18 met the selection criteria. The 5 most prevalent features of the available solutions (N=18) were medical data access (14/18, 78%), medical service processing (14/18, 78%), diagnostic support (10/18, 56%), payment transactions (10/18, 56%), and fundraising for telemedical instrument development (5/18, 28%).ConclusionsThese different features (eg, medical data access, medical service processing, epidemiology reporting, diagnostic support, and treatment support) allow us to discuss the possibilities for integration of blockchain technology into telemedicine and health care on different levels. In this area, a wide range of tasks can be identified that could be accomplished based on digital technologies using blockchains.
| S-EPMC8411324 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Blockchain is a decentralized transaction and data management technology developed first for Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The interest in Blockchain technology has been increasing since the idea was coined in 2008. The reason for the interest in Blockchain is its central attributes that provide security, anonymity and data integrity without any third party organization in control of the transactions, and therefore it creates interesting research areas, especially from the perspective of technical challenges and limitations. In this research, we have conducted a systematic mapping study with the goal of collecting all relevant research on Blockchain technology. Our objective is to understand the current research topics, challenges and future directions regarding Blockchain technology from the technical perspective. We have extracted 41 primary papers from scientific databases. The results show that focus in over 80% of the papers is on Bitcoin system and less than 20% deals with other Blockchain applications including e.g. smart contracts and licensing. The majority of research is focusing on revealing and improving limitations of Blockchain from privacy and security perspectives, but many of the proposed solutions lack concrete evaluation on their effectiveness. Many other Blockchain scalability related challenges including throughput and latency have been left unstudied. On the basis of this study, recommendations on future research directions are provided for researchers.
| S-EPMC5047482 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Background: Subtitles are produced through different workflows and technologies: from fully automatic to human in open source web editors or in-house platforms, and increasingly through hybrid human-machine interaction. There is little agreement regarding subtitle copyright beyond the understanding that it is a derivative work. While same language verbatim subtitles may have little room for creativity, interlingual subtitling is heavily dependent on the subtitler skills to translate, prioritise, and condense information. These days creative subtitles are increasingly being used as one more aesthetic element in audiovisual narrative. Though they may be in the same language, the visual attributes that contribute to the narrative development make creative subtitles one more element that should be acknowledged and copyright protected. Methods: The paper will present a short introduction to subtitling copyright. It will then describe centralised and decentralised copyright management - where blockchain technology can be applied to aid subtitler identification. A focus group with expert professional subtitlers was organised, and feedback is reported. Conclusions: Subtitle copyright is country dependent, still subtitling working practices and media asset distribution have no geographical borders. Blockchain technology -as a concept- could aid subtitle traceability. This can be useful beyond financial and moral right management and work towards media sustainability, allowing for reuse and repurpose of existing media assets.
| S-EPMC10446087 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The increasing number of rice product safety issues and the potential for contamination have established an enormous need for an effective strategy for the traceability of the rice supply chain. Tracing the origins of a rice product from raw materials to end customers is very complex and costly. Existing food supply chain methods (for example, rice) do not provide a scalable and cost-effective means of agricultural food supply. Besides, consumers lack the capability and resources required to check or report on the quality of agricultural goods in terms of defects or contamination. Consequently, customers are forced to decide whether to utilize or discard the goods. However, blockchain is an innovative framework capable of offering a transformative solution for the traceability of agricultural products and food supply chains. The aim of this paper is to propose a framework capable of tracking and monitoring all interactions and transactions between all stakeholders in the rice chain ecosystem through smart contracts. The model incorporates a system for customer satisfaction feedback, which enables all stakeholders to get up-to-date information on product quality, enabling them to make more informed supply chain decisions. Each transaction is documented and stored in the public ledger of the blockchain. The proposed framework provides a safe, efficient, reliable, and effective way to monitor and track rice products safety and quality especially during product purchasing. The security and performance analysis results shows that the proposed framework outperform the benchmark techniques in terms of cost-effectiveness, security and scalability with low computational overhead.
| S-EPMC8771771 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This work intends to comprehensively analyze the application of blockchain technology in enterprise financial accounting information sharing and address prevalent issues such as information opacity, data tampering, and data security in the current practices. Therefore, it writes smart contracts based on the Ethereum platform to achieve the secure sharing of financial accounting information between enterprises. This work employs a randomized experimental design approach, using a computer-generated random number program to divide 100 enterprises into experimental and control groups, each comprising 50 enterprises. Enterprises in the experimental group share financial accounting information using smart contracts on the Ethereum platform during the experiment. The financial personnel of these enterprises upload reconciled data to the corresponding smart contracts using the enterprise's digital signatures after each month's accounting process. Enterprises in the control group continue to use traditional methods of financial accounting information sharing (such as email and web platforms) to share financial data files directly. Quantitative analysis is performed to compare the data between the experimental and control groups. Empirical results reveal a notable enhancement in information-sharing efficiency by 25.7%, a 19.8% improvement in data accuracy, and a 13.6% reduction in financial information-sharing costs within the experimental group compared to the control group. This work provides compelling evidence that adopting blockchain-based information-sharing methods can effectively elevate data trustworthiness and security. Supported by systematic empirical findings, this work validates the significant potential of blockchain technology in the realm of enterprise financial accounting information sharing.
| S-EPMC10849433 | biostudies-literature