Healthcare is one of the basic human needs and an important aspect of connected living. With the advancement of technologies, it is gradually transitioning away from traditional hospital-centric care towards a more virtual and distributed care. Health 4.0 is new buzz word in the healthcare systems. It is artificial intelligence (AI)-based intelligent devices enabled through the internet of medical things (IoMT). It is made up of medical sensors, cloud, edge and fog-computing, and wireless communication technology. The data collected from the patients are sensitive as it is crucial for diagnosis and to make critical decisions. Hence, the cyber criminals invest significant amounts of effort, time, and resources to exploit these data. So, in order to improve the security of the system, a framework for a blockchain-based smart healthcare system is proposed. In addition to it, the prelude on the Health 4.0 components and the current research challenges, benefits, and applications are discussed. Finally, the use case along with the applications of blockchain in the healthcare sector are discussed.
TopIntroduction To Health 4.0
One of the most basic human needs is healthcare (Li & Carayon, 2021). The basic enabling technologies include wireless sensor network and processing algorithms to generate a meaningful information from the data collected through the sensors. But, it faces a number of challenges, including high costs for professionals, healthcare services, and equipment; a lack of skilled professionals; the need for collaboration between healthcare providers and supporting industries; and fierce competition among healthcare providers. These problems are forcing healthcare practitioners to think about incorporating and implementing new healthcare models based on cutting-edge information and communication technologies (Tortorella, et al., 2021). As the Industry 4.0 era ushers in smart and autonomous industrial processes with benefits such as improved operation, lower costs, and higher quality, Health 4.0 takes on the principles of Industry 4.0 to address these concerns.
Health 4.0 offers a new and exciting vision for the healthcare industry (Yang, et al., 2020). The principles of health 4.0 is adapted from Industry 4.0 principles. It is a new buzz word in the healthcare systems which is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based intelligent devices enabled through the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). It transforms the healthcare business model by improving interactions among patients, stakeholders, infrastructure, and the value chain (Tortorella, et al., 2021). Health 4.0 integrate the latest technologies such as IoMT, AI, machine learning, cloud-, edge-, fog-computing, big data analytic and blockchain (Haleem, Javaid, Singh, & Suman, 2022). These technologies are referred to as components, and they are depicted in Figure 1. The main objectives of Health 4.0 are:
The major elements of Health 4.0 are: smartness and interconnection (Chanchaichujit, Tan, & Eaimkhong, 2019). Smartness refers to the use of AI tools for improving treatment, diagnosis and individualized patient-care management system. Interconnection refers to integrating all the healthcare aspects to create an effective information network. Some of the elements that are interconnected in Health 4.0 are: interaction between patients and caregivers, interaction within the professional care team, equipment and devices, insurance, billing and costs.
Design of Health 4.0
Design is crucial in the development of smart healthcare systems and the delivery of healthcare with greater effectiveness and efficiency. Understanding and influencing the patient experience for the best potential outcome is an important role of design in advancing smart healthcare systems (Sisodia & Jindal, 2021). Hence, Health 4.0 is designed based on six design principles:
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Interoperability, the ability to connect various medical systems and devices;
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Virtualization, the ability to make virtual/digital duplicates of various medical devices, systems, and processes;
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Decentralization, the ability of health-care systems to control over themselves by making appropriate decisions;
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Real-time capability, the ability to gather and analyze health data in order to take appropriate action;
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Service Oriented, the ability to develop software services for medical devices and systems interactions;
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Modularity, the ability to update individual modules, to meet new requirements and to reuse available modules to build new health/medical systems.