A group of scholars from South Korea's Kyung Hee University (Department of Computer Engineering) has unveiled a paper that proposes a design of the IoT-based system that combats counterfeiting in the healthcare supply chain. It uses IOTA’s Tangle to process data.
Sensors will track crucial data
The system proposed by researchers Sabah Suhail, Shashi Raj Pandey and Choong Seon Hong introduces an equipment-specific ledger that collects all data about healthcare products' origin and logistics. The information will be harvested through specific sensors.
Interesting work on how to improve the #healthcare supply chain using #IOTA. A work by an academic team from @kh_univ, supported by the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the #Korea government. https://t.co/5gUft0dHlV
— IOTA (@iotatoken) August 17, 2020
These sensors will be attached to packages with healthcare products by special batches. Sensors will broadcast and save both environment-specific data (air temperature, humidity, etc.) and location information. Furthermore, this system can support timestamps to ensure that the drugs are shipped as intended.
Then, the system will broadcast sensor data to Tangle, the one-of-a-kind data structure behind IOTA's distributed ledger technology. To ensure data security and integrity, Korean engineers will deploy the Masked Authentication Messaging (MAM) protocol to the ecosystem.
That said, the information will become available to all legitimate participants of the healthcare products supply chain, i.e., doctors, patients, and producers.
Thousands of transactions per second for IoT solutions
According to the text of the report, this concept was stress-tested successfully on the Raspberry PI 3B hardware platform for IoT devices. The engineers revealed that fetching the data consumes more resources than uploading it does.
As covered by CryptoComes recently, IOTA’s Chrysalis mechanism reached the bandwidth of 1,000 transactions per second. It results in very low latency: IOTA transactions are confirmed in 10 seconds now.
Successful Chrysalis testing and auditing will pave the road to Coordicide, the elimination of the centralization point in IOTA DLT, Coordinator. Once Coordinator operations are stopped, IOTA will become a fully decentralized blockchain.