On the Decentralization of Health Systems for Data Availability: a DLT-based Architecture

Mobile devices entered people’s lives by leaps and bounds, offering various applications relying on private third-party entities to manage their users’ data. Centralized control of personal health data endangers the privacy of the users directly involved. In the future, there will likely be a trend toward decentralizing the health data collection, relieving central entities of this task. This comes with several challenges in a decentralized environment, such as avoiding a single point of failure to guarantee data availability. The following work proposes an architecture based on Distributed Ledger Technology to allow users to decide on their data while ensuring availability by employing social networks. We will outline the mechanisms behind data storage and the implications of using smart contracts in the architecture. In concluding the work, we show the developed architecture and results deriving from its assessment, highlighting possible use cases applied to the specific health data management contex.