A healthcare digital twin system based on blockchain technology

Abstract

Digital Twin (DT) is a technology that replicates any physical phenomenon from physical space to digital space in congruous with the physical form’s state. It does not confine to only spatial objects, any non-spatial scenarios can also be depicted with proper perception of the states. Though, DT technology was proposed with the incentive of revamping the intricate product lifecycle management in manufacture sector, other sectors like aviation, real states, healthcare, etc., have embraced it. By integrating DT in the healthcare sector, portrayal of patients in the digital space makes chances to create digital models, providing proper diagnosis, and evaluation facilities for digital healthcare services and Smart-health. However, determining a healthcare DT model for patient care and clinical purposes is seen as a challenging and imponderable task because of the lack of adequate data collection structures. Moreover, there are a number of problems in healthcare DT such as fragmented data and communication disorder which are making efforts futile. Also, the concept of healthcare DT is not formally defined and there lacks a consistent system architec ture and data model, using which the diverse data flow of a Healthcare DT can be perceived structurally and can be used for later purposes. The collected structured data and careful simulation with proper analysis can render propitious opportunities in grievous health situations. For this reason, formulating a comprehensive health care data model for Healthcare DT is a prominent and preemptory task. On the other hand, there are also security and privacy issues as healthcare data can be used in malicious ways. For these reasons, to acquire the codified and finesse data with total integrity and proper access control, blockchain can be incorporated with the DT technology. In this thesis, we present a mathematical concept data model to ac cumulate the patient relevant data in a structured and predefined way with proper delineation. Additionally, the provided data model is described in harmony with real life contexts. Then, we have used the patient centric mathematical data model to formally define the semantic and scope of Healthcare Digital Twin system based on Blockchain. Accordingly, the proposed system is described with all the key com ponents as well as proper protocol flow and evaluation. A short implementation of the proposed system has been conducted using Hyperledger Fabric and BigchainDB blockchains.