A blockchain-machine learning ecosystem for IoT-Based remote health monitoring of diabetic patients

Abstract

Diabetes poses a global health challenge, demanding continuous monitoring and expert care for effective management. Conventional monitoring methods lack real-time insights and secure data-sharing capabilities, necessitating innovative solutions that leverage emerging technologies. Existing centralized monitoring systems often entail risks such as data breaches and single points of failure, emphasizing the necessity for a secure, decentralized approach that integrates the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, and machine learning for efficient and secure diabetes management. This paper introduces a decentralized, blockchain-based framework for remote diabetes monitoring, IoT sensors, machine learning models, and decentralized applications (DApps). The proposed framework comprises five layers: the IoT Sensor Layer, which collects real-time health data from patients; the Blockchain Layer, leveraging smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain for secure data sharing and transactions; the machine learning Layer, analyzing patient data to detect diabetes; and the DApps Layer, facilitating interactions between patients, doctors, and hospitals. For intelligent decision-making regarding diabetes based on data collected from different sensors, nine machine learning algorithms, including logistic regression, K-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), Decision Tree, Random Forest, AdaBoost, stochastic gradient boosting (SGD), and Naive Bayes, were trained and tested on the PIMA dataset. Based on the performance evaluation parameters such as accuracy, recall, F1-score, and the area under the curve (AUC), it was found that the AdaBoost model achieved the highest predictive accuracy of 92.64%, followed by the Decision Tree with an accuracy of 92.21% in diabetes classification.