IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May/June 2023 - 65

for home monitoring purpose. Furthermore, it is
assumed that the wearable devices will securely
communicate with the mobile device of a patient
by establishing session keys among them. In addition,
the mobile device and fog server will also
establish secret key among them for their secure
communication. On the other hand, secure communication
among the fog server and the associated
CSs are done using the elliptic curve
cryptography-based encryption anddecryption.
Block creation, verification as well as addition,
are done in a peer-to-peer (P2P) CS network, called
P2P CSN. Once the data are securely received from
the fog server(s) in the form of transactions by the
peer nodes, the transaction is updated into each
node's transactions pool. This means that each
peer node has a transactions pool that is upgraded
by the new one. A new block is created by a proposer
(also called a leader), which is elected by a
round-robin fashion from the P2P CSN once the
transactions pool reaches to a certain predefined
transaction threshold value. The block addition
and verification are executed by a widely adopted
distributed algorithm, named as " Practical Byzantine
Fault Tolerance algorithm. " 12
The entire process of the voting-based consensus
algorithm is described as follows.
The proposer broadcasts the proposed block
into the entire network. Other nodes (called
the followers) receive the proposed block
that contains some transactions.
After that, the followers verify the block with
their maintained own transactions pool.
If the injected transactions in the proposed
block are successfully verified with their
existing pool, then the block is called verified.
Finally, the block will be added to the
blockchain.
The general structure of a block in the private
blockchain is shown in Figure 2. It consists of
block header and block payload as follows.
Block Header: It has the following fields.
Block Version: It is a unique number that
represents a block in the blockchain.
Previous Block Hash: It denotes the hash
value of the contents of the previous
block of a current block to be added into
the blockchain.
May/June 2023
FIGURE 2. Private-block structure.
Merkle Tree Root: It is the hash value of all
the transactions present in a block, which is
used to verify the transactions of that block.
Timestamp: It is the time when a block
was created.
Signer's Public Key: It is the public key that is
used to verify the signature of an encrypted
transaction ETx, ECDSA.SigðETxÞ,using the
elliptic curve digital signature verification
algorithm, ECDSA.Ver(.), that is, f0; 1g
ECDSA.Ver[ECDSA.SigðETxÞ].
Block Payload: It contains a specific number of
encrypted transactions and their signatures
pairs of the form: ðETx; ECDSA.SigðETxÞÞ.
Current Block Hash: It is finally the hash value
of all the fields contained in the block header
and block payload.
Combination of blockchain and AI can help in
the big data analysis process on the information
stored on blocks in a private blockchain for better
prediction of results and tracking of patients who
are under the home monitoring system in the proposed
framework. There are several attacks that
can be performed by an attacker, such as " Poisson
noise insertion attack " and " data poisoning attack "
on the data that are simply stored in the CS. Since
the blockchain provides immutability, transparency,
and decentralization, once the blocks
are validated successfully, the information
stored in the blocks is treated as genuine. Hence,
by applying the AI and machine learning (ML)-based
approaches on the authenticated datasets stored in
the private blockchain, correct predictions are quite
expected. As a result, better big data analytics for
the patient's COVID-19 data including patient tracking
is viable.
The overall process containing in the proposed
framework for COVID-19-related patients
65
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May/June 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May/June 2023
