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A reliable vaccine tracking and monitoring system for health clinics using blockchain
Biswas, Kamanashis Muthukkumarasamy, Vallipuram Bai, Guangdong Chowdhury, Mohammad Jabed Morshed
Biswas, Kamanashis
Muthukkumarasamy, Vallipuram
Bai, Guangdong
Chowdhury, Mohammad Jabed Morshed
Abstract
Vaccines are delicate biological substances that gradually become inactive over time and must be kept under a recommended temperature range of 2–8 °C for both short and long-term storage. Exposure to heat or freezing temperatures can highly affect the immunological properties of these vaccines and make them completely ineffective. Research shows that vaccine exposure to temperatures outside the recommended range is 33% in developed countries and 37.1% in developing countries. In practice, vaccines are stored in refrigerators, while thermometers and data loggers are used to record and monitor temperatures. However, traditional systems are unreliable due to lack of battery backup, human error, periodic logging of temperatures, etc. Therefore, an effective and reliable vaccine tracking and monitoring system is urgently needed. This paper proposes a blockchain-based, smart contract enabled solution that ensures an enhanced level of security, transparency, and traceability of stored vaccines in a health clinic, and enables the complete history of every vaccine to be checked from the day the vaccine is received by the health clinic to the date it is used or expires. We also formally analyze the resiliency of the proposed system against several attacks and compare the system with existing blockchain and non-blockchain-based solutions.
Keywords
Date
2023
Type
Journal article
Journal
Scientific Reports
Book
Volume
13
Issue
Page Range
1-14
Article Number
Article 570
ACU Department
Peter Faber Business School
Faculty of Law and Business
Faculty of Law and Business
Collections
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
CC BY 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© The Author(s) 2023.
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