A Lightweight, Secure, and Scalable Blockchain-Fog-IoMT Healthcare Framework with IPFS Data Storage for Healthcare 4.0

The gathering, processing, transmission, sharing, and storage of healthcare data was the core idea behind Healthcare 4.0. Currently, most of the existing solutions for offering smart healthcare services rely on cloud-based platforms. The main issues with current healthcare systems include storage overhead, processing speed, scalability, single points of failure, bandwidth requirements, and device connectivity. The recent challenges in the healthcare system motivated us to develop a system by integrating the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), Blockchain, fog computing, and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to achieve decentralization, scalability, security, immutability, and data privacy. In this paper, we propose a novel IoMT and Blockchain framework with fog node computing to reduce latency and speed up processing, as well as to reduce the network congestion, bandwidth requirements, and the main Blockchain network overload. Untrusted devices are connected to the system using a proxy monitor, which records the device’s activity. In addition, the interplanetary file system (IPFS) is integrated with the Blockchain network to store patient data and files in order to ensure the system’s decentralization, scalability, security, and privacy. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed framework in terms of security, scalability, latency, storage, efficiency, and performance. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed framework makes access, searches, uploads, and downloads faster and more secure. © 2024, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.