Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Introduction <s> The latest generation of smartphones are increasingly viewed as handheld computers rather than as phones, due to their powerful on-board computing capability, capacious memories, large screens and open operating systems that encourage application development. This paper provides a brief state-of-the-art overview of health and healthcare smartphone apps (applications) on the market today, including emerging trends and market uptake. Platforms available today include Android, Apple iOS, RIM BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows (Windows Mobile 6.x and the emerging Windows Phone 7 platform). The paper covers apps targeting both laypersons/patients and healthcare professionals in various scenarios, e.g., health, fitness and lifestyle education and management apps; ambient assisted living apps; continuing professional education tools; and apps for public health surveillance. Among the surveyed apps are those assisting in chronic disease management, whether as standalone apps or part of a BAN (Body Area Network) and remote server configuration. We describe in detail the development of a smartphone app within eCAALYX (Enhanced Complete Ambient Assisted Living Experiment, 2009-2012), an EU-funded project for older people with multiple chronic conditions. The eCAALYX Android smartphone app receives input from a BAN (a patient-wearable smart garment with wireless health sensors) and the GPS (Global Positioning System) location sensor in the smartphone, and communicates over the Internet with a remote server accessible by healthcare professionals who are in charge of the remote monitoring and management of the older patient with multiple chronic conditions. Finally, we briefly discuss barriers to adoption of health and healthcare smartphone apps (e.g., cost, network bandwidth and battery power efficiency, usability, privacy issues, etc.), as well as some workarounds to mitigate those barriers. <s> BIB001 </s> Towards the Uses of Blockchain in Mobile Health Services and Applications: A Survey <s> Introduction <s> Display Omitted An extensive review of the state of the art on m-Health and related approaches.Study of the scientific developments/break-through on m-Health.Analysis of the top mobile health applications in the top mobile markets.Discussion about current and open issues on m-Health services and technologies. Health telematics is a growing up issue that is becoming a major improvement on patient lives, especially in elderly, disabled, and chronically ill. In recent years, information and communication technologies improvements, along with mobile Internet, offering anywhere and anytime connectivity, play a key role on modern healthcare solutions. In this context, mobile health (m-Health) delivers healthcare services, overcoming geographical, temporal, and even organizational barriers. M-Health solutions address emerging problems on health services, including, the increasing number of chronic diseases related to lifestyle, high costs of existing national health services, the need to empower patients and families to self-care and handle their own healthcare, and the need to provide direct access to health services, regardless of time and place. Then, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the state of the art on m-Health services and applications. It surveys the most significant research work and presents a deep analysis of the top and novel m-Health services and applications proposed by industry. A discussion considering the European Union and United States approaches addressing the m-Health paradigm and directives already published is also considered. Open and challenging issues on emerging m-Health solutions are proposed for further works. <s> BIB002
The Blockchain technology, mostly know by its application on Bitcoin  ), has nowadays a profound impact on a significant number of areas of knowledge, well beyond the cryptocurrencies application scenario. The applicability of blockchain technology affects how data is stored and its security properties. Widespread research into these technologies is still being made in order to leverage its advantages and use them in varied fields of knowledge, such as predictive algorithms, finances or robotics  ,  . While there are some areas that clearly benefit from the capabilities of blockchain technology, in others the discussion becomes more complex and the advantages are not well understood from the start, since research is overall in early stage. One area where the benefits are clearly comprehensible is healthcare, particularly, m-Health BIB002 . Initially, the concept of electronic health (e-Health) was only associated with communication mechanisms between health service providers and between them and the patients. Medical records could be easily accessed and communicated to patients or other entities almost instantly by using mobile devices like cellphones or personal computers  . Currently, m-Health is an evolving field with new advancements occurring every day, and its complexity and capabilities have increased exponentially, allowing much more than just communications between users. The evolution of mobile devices in recent years, enabled remote data collection, access, sharing and processing, as well as interfacing with the user in order to provide information in a comprehensible behaviour. Moreover, mobile devices are now commonly equipped with several sensors and interfaces, transforming them in perfect monitoring tools for users, that in anytime and anywhere can access information on various health metrics, enabling self-care, health education BIB001 . However, m-Health and any other systems that encompasses a serviceoriented architecture, do not come without concerns and issues that must be addressed. These systems must guarantee service quality and safety to gain widespread credibility to the point where cooperation between traditional health service providers and these new devices can be achieved. Hence, the health system itself will change by making use of the advantages these technologies provide in order to improve availability, security and service quality  . This paper presents a comprehensive review of the state of the art on m-Health security techniques and current blockchain applications in healthcare. Moreover, it presents and discusses the major challenges and advantages of blockchain application in m-Health systems, highlighting the key issues and proposing future conceptual solutions. Finally, it elaborates on future conceptual proposals for blockchain implementations in m-Health services and applications. The main contributions of this paper are the following: The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces m-Health and a reviews the most widely adopted security practices for m-Health systems and applications. Section 3 presents a review on current blockchain implementations in both healthacare and m-Health areas. In Section 4, a discussion on current and open-issues and presents a proposal for future conceptual solutions of blockchain implementations in m-Health applications.Finally, the paper is concluded on Section 5.