Non-fungible token-based health record marketplace

Abstract

With an increasing affinity towards patient-centric care, sharing real-time sensitive data for collaboration between multiple parties with finer access control becomes critical. Most existing studies based on the blockchain technology in the medical field discuss various application scenarios and security aspects, without focusing on data ownership, secure data sharing, or finer access control. In this work, a non-fungible token (NFT)-based system is proposed to implement a health record marketplace. The system leverages the NFT technology to provide dual ownership along with finer access control and efficiency in data sharing. The advantage of permissioned blockchain along with InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) are taken for off-chain data storage to improve security and efficiency. Because price determination is critical in the market, Stackelberg game theory is utilized to determine pricing strategies for both data owners and consumers. Also, to efficiently achieve finer access control, a popularity-based adaptive NFT management scheme using reinforcement learning is proposed. Simulation experiments are carried out to demonstrate accuracy and efficiency of our proposed schemes.