SynCare: An Innovative Remote Patient Monitoring System Secured by Cryptography and Blockchain
Abstract
Remote patient monitoring involves the collection of patient-generated health data, using sensors/devices and mobile apps, to allow observation of patient’s health status, also outside healthcare environments. The challenge in this field is to facilitate patient-centric data storing, sharing, and retrieving, with high attention to personal, sensitive data privacy and protection. This study presents SynCare, a patient-centered ecosystem developed by LifeCharger, for secure health-related data recording and remote patient monitoring. SynCare has been developed with the aim of making up a strong loop between patients, healthcare professionals and informal caregivers, building up secure channels for data sharing and supporting the patients in the management of their own health and related data. The system includes: 1) a mobile app for the patient, offering different features supporting the therapy and allowing the management of consents to share key data with the healthcare professionals and/or caregivers, 2) a database on Cloud, storing all the encrypted, sensitive health-data, 3) public Ethereum blockchain to validate the data sharing consents, 4) a clinical dashboard developed as a web application whose main purpose is to allow healthcare professional to display and analyze the data collected by the patient through the mobile app. The SynCare ecosystem implements a software developed by LiberActa srl to asynchronously load the anonymous consent data on the Ethereum public blockchain, decoupling the user experience from the blockchain interaction, which can be slow, without compromising the data security.