MedTech Chain: Decentralised, Secure and Privacy-preserving Platform for Medical Device Data Research

Rapid advancements in digital medical technologies have significantly improved patient care but have also raised complex security and privacy challenges. Traditional tools for detecting vulnerabilities in networked medical devices, primarily used by network administrators and security specialists, have become insufficient due to their large-scale use across the entire healthcare network. Aiming to improve security in healthcare, MedTech Chain proposes a way to solve this challenge by leveraging blockchain and privacy-enhancing technologies, offering an authenticated, decentralised, secure, and privacy-preserving environment for the research and monitoring of medical device data. Currently, the framework enables counting, averaging, and grouped counting queries with multiple filtering capabilities like time frame and location. Such functionalities can provide valuable insights not only for threat intelligence but also for medical research and hospital management. MedTech Chain is modular and flexible, designed to seamlessly extend to new device technologies and research demands. To our knowledge, the approach is among the first to employ ϵ-differential privacy in the context of medical device data.