A Taxonomic Review of the Use of IoT and Blockchain in Healthcare Applications

ObjectivesWith the rapid evolution and technology advancement, the healthcare sector is evolving day by day. It is taking advantage of different technologies such as Internet of things and Blockchain. Several applications related to daily healthcare activities are adopting the use of these technologies. In this paper, we present a review in which we group different healthcare applications that integrate the Internet of things and Blockchain in their systems.Material and methodsA review study about the integration of IoT and Blockchain in healthcare systems was conducted. We searched the databases ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, Google Scholar and ACM Digital Library.ResultsThis review focuses on categorizing the use cases of IoT and Blockchain in the healthcare sector. The study listed 6 applications in medical services, namely, remote patient monitoring, electronic medical records management, disease prediction, patient tracking, drug traceability and fighting infectious disease especially COVID-19. The paper also investigates the challenges associated with the adoption of the Blockchain technology in healthcare IoT-based systems and some of the existing solutions. It also introduces some future research directions.ConclusionThe survey of the use cases of IoT and Blockchain in the healthcare sector will serve as a state of the art for future researches. In addition, the paper gives some directions to new possible researches that could help to revolutionize the healthcare sector by using other technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, fog and cloud computing.