A Blockchain-Enabled IoT Framework for NICU Infant Health Monitoring System

Abstract

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 15 million infants are born prematurely each year. In the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), the critical health parameters of newborn babies must be monitored precisely and in real time. Approximately one million preterm babies suffer morbidity before the age of five due to preterm birth and complications associated with preterm delivery. The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) requires accurate, real-time monitoring of newborn infants' vital health parameters. One of the challenges encountered by the majority of hospitals is the lack of systems that can track real-time health parameters and notify doctors and parents to indicate any neonatal critical conditions. This research article presents a framework that incorporates IoT, fog, deep learning technologies, Blockchain, and decentralized cloud for NICU newborn health monitoring. The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technologies provides wide opportunities for enhancing the data management of neonatal intensive care units. By integrating IoT devices comprising wearable sensors and smart monitors the system gets real-time data on vital signs like heart rate, temperature, blood oxygen levels, and breathing rate. Fog computing is used for the instantaneous analysis of critical data, and an efficient deep learning algorithm will be implemented at the fog layer to classify data into either critical or non-critical data. Since fog has limited resources, a private blockchain is used to store critical data. The critical data is stored temporarily on a private blockchain and permanently on a decentralized cloud. © 2023 IEEE.