Toward the InterPlanetary Health Layer for the Internet of Medical Things With Distributed Ledgers and Storages

With the dramatic increase of the Internet of Medical Things devices, self and remote health data monitoring is consistently receiving more attention. However, medical devices are usually challenging to deploy due to privacy regulations, and they generally leverage a centralized third party. Enabling data sharing would enhance new medical studies, formulate new treatments, and deliver new digital health technologies. Solving the issue will have a triple impact: we will handle sensitive information easily, contribute to international medical advancements, and enable personalized care. A possible solution is to exploit decentralization distributing privacy concerns directly to users. Solutions enabling this vision are closely linked to Distributed Ledger Technologies. Through its characteristics of immutability and transparency, this technology would allow privacy-compliant solutions in contexts where privacy is the first need. This paper envisions the InterPlanetary Health Layer and related real-world implementations in the Internet of Medical Things domain. The main idea of the proposed solution is to handle sensitive data by preserving privacy and guaranteeing data availability. Specifically, users can build their private network, collaboratively authorize operations among their data and manage their privacy conditions without relying on a third party. The results of several stress tests conducted on a real case study confirmed the feasibility of the proposed solution, which shows good scalability and a modest impact on the application performance measured during the decentralized data access.