Korean government-funded research has proposed an IOTA-based healthcare solution to cater to the needs of the supply chain in the healthcare industry. This research was conducted by Kyung Hee University to find a suitable solution for the effective healthcare supply chain.
In the hard times of Coronavirus pandemic, monitoring, managing, and controlling the supply chain in the healthcare industry has become pivotal. Due to the increasing gaps in healthcare supply chains, the production of counterfeit medical devices has splurged. And, this research turns out to be useful in ensuring a reliable health care supply chain.
According to the researchers, the healthcare equipment production undergoes various stages, making it vulnerable to external counterfeiting. This research primarily focuses on two major problems linked to the tracking and monitoring of the supply chain—first, distribution and decentralization of data in a way that stakeholders can access it. Second, the tracing of different stages of the supply chain starts from the origin. With its proposed IOTA-based distributed ledger technology, these challenges in the supply chain can be resolved easily.
To bring complete confidentiality in the solution, the researchers have used MAM (Masked Authenticated Messaging) protocol. It also facilitates accessibility and data integrity. Under this solution, the usual participants, including logistics, raw material suppliers, and others, are used. Further, the medical devices are monitored through sensors that will provide relevant data as well as the supply chain. To add and retrieve the data, IOTA Tangle is used in the model system of the proposed solution.
The simulations of this IOTA solution have been carried out on a Raspberry Pi 3B, a hardware platform for IoT (Internet of Things), by the researchers. To record the particular environment conditions like humidity and temperature, the simulation uses a DHT-11 sensor in combination with Pi 3B Raspberry. Some limitations, like scalability with other blockchains, have also been addressed with IOTA.
This is all about the current use cases of the proposed IOTA-based solution for the healthcare supply chain. In the long-run, the researchers are planning to address other issues such as resource-constrained IoT and cross-border payments involved in the healthcare supply chain.