Blockchain for Healthcare Games Management

Abstract

More and more serious games have been developed in recent years for patients with aging, rehabilitation, mental, and other healthcare needs. Often, such healthcare games have different experiments or evaluations associated. Rapid advancements in healthcare games see increased regulatory concerns. Unfortunately, there is no authority like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in United States for regulatory approvals of healthcare games. Yet, it is not appropriate to use the traditional pharmaceutical FDA approval, which is a tedious and time-consuming process, for healthcare games. We propose a Healthcare Game Blockchain (HGB) to support game developers, healthcare providers, healthcare authorities, and patients. For healthcare game developers, HGB is a common platform to deposit healthcare game prototypes or products. HGB can collect feedback data for analysis similar to drug clinical trials on efficacy and toxicity. Volunteers can be recruited for clinical trials using the healthcare games available on HGB. Once the healthcare games are accepted with a recommended usage, patient gamers can leverage the same HGB platform for treatments following the instructions of healthcare providers. HGB allows healthcare professionals to track the patient responses during their healthcare game medication. Big data analytics can be developed to monitor patient outcomes and healthcare game efficacy. Security and privacy issues are critical in healthcare data handling. HGB has the potential to resolve these limitations and inefficiencies improving data collection, data sharing, and data security by leveraging on the intrinsic properties that blockchain technology provides. This paper explores the possibility of integrating blockchain and healthcare games supporting clinical trials and treatment monitoring.