BlockColdChain: Vaccine Cold Chain Blockchain
This addresses vaccine safety and loss issues for public health, but it is incremental as it applies existing blockchain and IoT technologies to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of vaccine spoilage due to temperature variations in the cold chain by proposing a blockchain-based system to track vaccine temperature history, with experimental results showing the system's feasibility.
In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based cold chain technology for vaccine cooling track. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused the death of millions of people. An important step towards ending the pandemic is vaccination. Vaccines must be kept under control temperature during the whole process, from fabrication to the hands of the health professionals who will immunize the population. However, there are numerous reports of vaccine loss due to temperature variations, and, currently, people getting vaccinated have no control if their vaccine was kept safe. Blockchain is a technology solution that can provide public and verifiable records. We review the World Health Organization (WHO) cool chain and Blockchain technology. Moreover, we describe current IoT temperature monitoring devices and propose Blockcoldchain to track vaccine cold chain using blockchain, thus proving an unalterable vaccine temperature history. Our experimental results using smart contracts demonstrate the system's feasibility.