Blockchain and COVID-19 pandemic: applications and challenges.

The year 2020 has witnessed the emergence of coronavirus (COVID-19) that has rapidly spread and adversely affected the global economy, health, and human lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the limitations of existing healthcare systems regarding their inadequacy to timely and efficiently handle public health emergencies. A large portion of today's healthcare systems are centralized and fall short in providing necessary information security and privacy, data immutability, transparency, and traceability features to detect fraud related to COVID-19 vaccination certification, and anti-body testing. Blockchain technology can assist in combating the COVID-19 pandemic by ensuring safe and reliable medical supplies, accurate identification of virus hot spots, and establishing data provenance to verify the genuineness of personal protective equipment. This paper discusses the potential blockchain applications for the COVID-19 pandemic. It presents the high-level design of three blockchain-based systems to enable governments and medical professionals to efficiently handle health emergencies caused by COVID-19. It discusses the important ongoing blockchain-based research projects, use cases, and case studies to demonstrate the adoption of blockchain technology for COVID-19. Finally, it identifies and discusses future research challenges, along with their key causes and guidelines.

Blockchain-based solution for COVID-19 vaccine waste reduction.

Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines have been produced on a large scale since 2020. However, large-scale vaccine production has led to two forms of waste; namely, overproduction and underutilization. Most of today's systems and technologies used to manage waste data related to COVID-19 vaccines fall short of providing transparency, traceability, accountability, trust, and security features. In this paper, we address the problem of COVID-19 vaccines waste due to their overproduction and underutilization. We propose a blockchain-based solution that is composed of five phases: registration, commitment; production and delivery; consumption; and waste assessment. These phases make up the complete life cycle of a COVID-19 vaccine, and they are governed by several smart contracts to ensure accountability of all the actions taken by the involved entities and reduce any excessive waste caused by overproduction, overordering, or underconsumption. We ensure security, traceability, and data provenance by recording all actions through smart contracts in the form of events on an immutable ledger. We utilize decentralized storage such as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to reduce the costs posed by large-sized file storage when stored on-chain. We present algorithms that describe the logic behind our developed smart contracts. We test and validate the functionalities of our proposed solution. We conduct security, cost, and scalability analyses to show that our solution is affordable, scalable, and secure. We compare our solution with the existing blockchain-based solutions to show its novelty and superiority. The smart contract code is made publicly available on GitHub.

Blockchain-Based Decentralized Digital Manufacturing and Supply for COVID-19 Medical Devices and Supplies.

Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has disclosed the deficiencies and limitations of the existing manufacturing and supply chain systems used for medical devices and supplies. It enforces the necessity to accelerate the shift towards decentralized digital manufacturing and supply chain networks. This paper proposes a blockchain-based solution for decentralized digital manufacturing of medical devices and their supply. We develop Ethereum smart contracts to govern and track transactions in a decentralized, transparent, traceable, auditable, trustworthy, and secure manner. This allows overcoming certain issues hindering the transition towards decentralized digital manufacturing and supply, including trusted traceability, attestations, certifications, and secured intellectual property (IP) rights. We incorporate the decentralized storage of the InterPlanetary file system (IPFS) into the Ethereum blockchain to store and fetch Internet of things (IoT)-based devices records and additional manufacturing and supply details. We present the system architecture and algorithms along with their full implementation and testing details. Furthermore, we present cost and security analyses to show that the proposed solution is cost-efficient and resilient against well-known vulnerabilities and security attacks. We make our smart contracts code publicly available on GitHub.

Blockchain-Based Solution for Distribution and Delivery of COVID-19 Vaccines.

Distribution and delivery of Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines have become challenging after their emergence. Today's platforms and systems leveraged for managing data related to COVID-19 vaccines' distribution and delivery fall short in providing transparency, trackability and traceability, immutability, audit, and trust features. Also, they are vulnerable to the single point of failure problem due to centralization. Such limitations hindering the safe, secure, transparent, trustworthy, and reliable distribution and delivery process of COVID-19 vaccines. In this paper, we propose an Ethereum blockchain-based solution for managing data related to COVID-19 vaccines' distribution and delivery. We develop smart contracts to automate the traceability of COVID-19 vaccines while ensuring data provenance, transparency, security, and accountability. We integrate the Ethereum blockchain with off-chain storage to manage non-critical and large-sized data. We present algorithms and discuss their full implementation, testing, and validation details. We evaluate the proposed solution by performing cost and security analysis as well as comparing it with the existing non-blockchain and blockchain-based solutions. Performance evaluation results reveal that the proposed solution is low-cost, and our smart contracts are secure enough against possible attacks and vulnerabilities. The smart contracts code along with testing scripts is made publicly available.

COVID-19 Contact Tracing Using Blockchain.

Contact tracing has widely been adopted to control the spread of Coronavirus-2019 (COVID-19). It enables to identify, assess, and manage people who have been exposed to COVID-19, thereby preventing from its further transmission. Today's most of the contact tracing approaches, tools, and solutions fall short in providing decentralized, transparent, traceable, immutable, auditable, secure, and trustworthy features. In this paper, we propose a decentralized blockchain-based COVID-19 contact tracing solution. Contact tracing can greatly suffice the need for a speedy response to a pandemic. We leverage the immutable and tamper-proof features of blockchain to enforce trust, accountability, and transparency. Trusted and registered oracles are used to bridge the gap between on-chain and off-chain data. With no third parties involved or centralized servers, the users' medical information is not prone to invasion, hacking, or abuse. Each user is registered using their digital medical passports. To respect the privacy of the users, their locations are updated with a time delay of 20 minutes. Using Ethereum smart contracts, transactions are executed on-chain with emitted events and immutable logs. We present details of the implemented algorithms and their testing analysis. We evaluate the proposed approach using security, cost, and privacy parameters to show its effectiveness. The smart contracts code is publicly made available on GitHub.

Blockchain-Based Forward Supply Chain and Waste Management for COVID-19 Medical Equipment and Supplies.

The year 2020 has witnessed unprecedented levels of demand for COVID-19 medical equipment and supplies. However, most of today's systems, methods, and technologies leveraged for handling the forward supply chain of COVID-19 medical equipment and the waste that results from them after usage are inefficient. They fall short in providing traceability, reliability, operational transparency, security, and trust features. Also, they are centralized that can cause a single point of failure problem. In this paper, we propose a decentralized blockchain-based solution to automate forward supply chain processes for the COVID-19 medical equipment and enable information exchange among all the stakeholders involved in their waste management in a manner that is fully secure, transparent, traceable, and trustworthy. We integrate the Ethereum blockchain with decentralized storage of interplanetary file systems (IPFS) to securely fetch, store, and share the data related to the forward supply chain of COVID-19 medical equipment and their waste management. We develop algorithms to define interaction rules regarding COVID-19 waste handling and penalties to be imposed on the stakeholders in case of violations. We present system design along with its full implementation details. We evaluate the performance of the proposed solution using cost analysis to show its affordability. We present the security analysis to verify the reliability of the smart contracts, and discuss our solution from the generalization and applicability point of view. Furthermore, we outline the limitations of our solution in form of open challenges that can act as future research directions. We make our smart contracts code publicly available on GitHub.

The role of blockchain technology in telehealth and telemedicine.

OBJECTIVE: Telehealth and telemedicine systems aim to deliver remote healthcare services to mitigate the spread of COVID-9. Also, they can help to manage scarce healthcare resources to control the massive burden of COVID-19 patients in hospitals. However, a large portion of today's telehealth and telemedicine systems are centralized and fall short of providing necessary information security and privacy, operational transparency, health records immutability, and traceability to detect frauds related to patients' insurance claims and physician credentials. METHODS: The current study has explored the potential opportunities and adaptability challenges for blockchain technology in telehealth and telemedicine sector. It has explored the key role that blockchain technology can play to provide necessary information security and privacy, operational transparency, health records immutability, and traceability to detect frauds related to patients' insurance claims and physician credentials. RESULTS: Blockchain technology can improve telehealth and telemedicine services by offering remote healthcare services in a manner that is decentralized, tamper-proof, transparent, traceable, reliable, trustful, and secure. It enables health professionals to accurately identify frauds related to physician educational credentials and medical testing kits commonly used for home-based diagnosis. CONCLUSIONS: Wide deployment of blockchain in telehealth and telemedicine technology is still in its infancy. Several challenges and research problems need to be resolved to enable the widespread adoption of blockchain technology in telehealth and telemedicine systems.

Blockchain-Based Solution for COVID-19 Digital Medical Passports and Immunity Certificates.

COVID-19 has emerged as a highly contagious disease which has caused a devastating impact across the world with a very large number of infections and deaths. Timely and accurate testing is paramount to an effective response to this pandemic as it helps identify infections and therefore mitigate (isolate/cure) them. In this paper, we investigate this challenge and contribute by presenting a blockchain-based solution that incorporates self-sovereign identity, re-encryption proxies, and decentralized storage, such as the interplanetary file systems (IPFS). Our solution implements digital medical passports (DMP) and immunity certificates for COVID-19 test-takers. We present smart contracts based on the Ethereum blockchain written and tested successfully to maintain a digital medical identity for test-takers that help in a prompt trusted response directly by the relevant medical authorities. We reduce the response time of the medical facilities, alleviate the spread of false information by using immutable trusted blockchain, and curb the spread of the disease through DMP. We present a detailed description of the system design, development, and evaluation (cost and security analysis) for the proposed solution. Since our code leverages the use of the on-chain events, the cost of our design is almost negligible. We have made our smart contract codes publicly available on Github.