Blockchain and smart contracts in health-related MyData scenario

Abstract

The MyData is concept framework that refers to human-centric ways of personal data management. Personal data gained significant attention recently. As the developing of Ubicomp technology, more and more particularly personal data are generating and collecting. Personal data own increasingly important economic, social, and practical value. However, individuals have little or no power to control when and how their data being created or processed by companies, organizations or governments. The MyData aim to provide individuals with practical methods to obtain, access, and utilize their personal datasets and to encourage organizations to give users control over their personal data. In this way, access and trade personal data can expect to build an open data market. Two challenges to achieve this goal is how to gain the individuals trust and permission and how to provide a more human-centric way to support personal data management and utilization.

To explore a novel and reliable way to address the challenges in MyData, this thesis utilizes blockchain technology to support MyData framework. Blockchain is a decentralized transparent ledger with the transaction information that shared among all peer-to-peer network nodes. It has the potential to gain users trust and provide a solution to gain users permission in data trade.

This thesis work focuses on studying blockchain and smart contract performance in MyData architecture. An Ethereum blockchain based MyData system that combined AWARE platform designed and implemented. The system deploys smart contract that provides users’ account management, personal data access, trade services, and information inquiry services in the Ethereum blockchain. Based on this system, two experiments designed to evaluate the performance of the integrated MyData system. The experiments results demonstrate how blockchain can facilitate MyData concept and how gas price influences the system performance. The thesis work shows that the blockchain and smart contract have the potential to provide the necessary technology support to solve the challenge in gain users’ trust and permission and support new business models and open data market to benefit both the data consumer and data producer. Additionally, blockchain and the smart contract can provide a more fine-grained and transparent way to help individuals to manage and utilize their personal data.