Enabling Blockchain with IoMT Devices for Healthcare

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear 

The paper suggests a novel architecture for using Blockchain in healthcare system. 

We recommend the author to update the manuscipt with minor revisions as below:

1. Please make sure that you have properly make the in-text citations of all the figures and table

2. Please strengthen the abstract by giving more details of about the proposed framework

3. it is advised to make sure that all the sections/sub-sections should have proper numberings

4. Please make sure that you used the abbreviations after properly defining them and subsequently using the defined abbreviations

5. Kindly make sure that your paper is checked properly for grammar and other spelling corrections with proper punctuations wherever needed. 

6. Add some recent references. 

The manuscript concept is good and we appreciate that the authors designed a prototype model for the concept proposed in the study.

Author Response

Dear Sir

We thank you for the generous comments on the manuscript and have edited the manuscript to address the concerns. 

PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHMENT

We believe that the manuscript is now suitable for publication.

On behalf of all the authors:

Dr. Nayyar Ahmed Khan

Corresponding Author

[email protected] 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript is well built with advanced methodologies of managing the high informatization data from the hospital through the secure ways via blockchain technology. The salient real time features along with technology validation related to the current thirst scenario. However the conveying point over the traditonal cloud based gateway services would have been mentioned stronger by projecting the comparision through literatures. The collected componential data's heirarchy are well utilized to the complete potential and also well structured by the layer by layer approaches.

1. It will be essential to add the literature for the section " Fog, Edge and Cloud - Computing" to strengthen the revived fact that why blockchain turned out to be a essential one interms of improving the existing terminologies and its associated range of secure in accordance with the current proposed system. 

2. The section "Research Motivation" contains non-sequential information because it is intiated from the platforms and then carried away with the data-preservation and protection along which impedes the research motivation to seperate dimension. Kindly stick only with the data-privacy leakage as a centric point and anchoring value to the proposed framework. This section is too long and can be partioned with research objectives or framed / proposed methodology as a seperate section, especially the lateral part of the particular section.

3. The section "Decision Making at Cloud Layer" requires the valid explanation over the database retrieval through smart cloud gateway and notify the adapted blockchain nod to the existing node system. 

4. The vulnerabilities of the various data-privacy leaks over the common cloud-platforms and applying the blockchain technology to overcome these vulnerabilities have been expressed very well within the designed system and its networked formation. If structured figure which can related the whole system flow-design, please draft it inside the Experiment and Observation section. 

5. Found many spelling errors in the figure labels and text documents inside. For ex: Figure 14 label "Accurcy" instead of Accuracy. So revisit the mansucript to rectify the typos.

Author Response

Dear Sir

We thank you for the generous comments on the manuscript and have edited the manuscript to address the concerns. 

PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHMENT

We believe that the manuscript is now suitable for publication.

On behalf of all the authors:

Dr. Nayyar Ahmed Khan

Corresponding Author

[email protected] 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The structural organization of the paper makes it a little difficult to read. While the general objective of the paper seems interesting, but the paper has failed to provide any solid contribution to integrating smart contracts and IOT for secure data processing of medical data using edge or cloud computing.

The author must considering restructuring the paper, or at least add a paragraph that clearly summarizes the organization of the paper at the end of the Introduction section.

Considering the title of the paper, it is not clear how blockchain addresses the data processing issues in medial IoT devices pointed in the introduction of the paper. Also, the terms edge computing and fog computing have not been properly introduced in the paper.

Shouldn't section 2.1 be part of the introduction?

Why is the figure representing the proposed system design included in part of the motivation section whereas a separate section is dedicated to presenting the designed system?

The system design section is very confusing.  Most of the texts that describe blockchain components, ledger, secure etc should rather be part of the background section.

Also, it is not clear (at least to my understanding) which part of the paragraphs in the system design section is an actual contribution to the designed system.

What methodology was applied in designing the proposed system? There should be a separate methodology section that describes how the proposed system is designed and evaluated.

The objective and method used in performing the evaluation experiment were not presented. The F1 score and other analytics metrics presented are for evaluating the performance of machine learning models, not blockchain systems. The experiments should rather focus on usability (if applicable), performance and scalability of the implemented system.

Author Response

Dear Sir

We thank you for the generous comments on the manuscript and have edited the manuscript to address the concerns. 

PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHMENT

We believe that the manuscript is now suitable for publication.

On behalf of all the authors:

Dr. Nayyar Ahmed Khan

Corresponding Author

[email protected] 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

This article presents an approach for IoMT data to be collected over Edge Computing gateway devices and to be forwarded to Cloud Gateway. A three-layered decision-making structure that guarantees the integrity of the data is presented. Deep analysis of information collected from sensor devices is done in the Cloud IoT Central Hub service.

The secrecy and compliance of the patient data, Smart Contracts are integrated using the health blockchain. The P2P network makes it viable to retain all health statistics and further processing of information. Finally, the paper describes an application scenario and gives the experimental setup.

While I understand the empirical nature of the research, the technical and theoretical contributions are not clear. The described architecture (Fig. 1) and all the following implementation-specific functions are generic in technical terms or platform-specific!

In your literature review, discuss the theoretical foundations of the research topic and how research builds on or differs from existing literature, e.g., https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8972565

and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167404821002170

As this is an empirical study, the conclusions/recommendations (i.e., lessons learnt) made by the authors should be much stronger.

Finally, the English writing and presentation should be significantly improved. I could count tens of grammatical errors in the abstract and introduction. The authors should also fix all weak/awkward sentences.

Author Response

Dear Sir

We thank you for the generous comments on the manuscript and have edited the manuscript to address the concerns. 

PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHMENT

We believe that the manuscript is now suitable for publication.

On behalf of all the authors:

Dr. Nayyar Ahmed Khan

Corresponding Author

[email protected] 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The new version is well improved, properly structured and easy to read now.

The contributions of the paper are also apparent to the reader.

One more comment, rename "4. System Design and Methodology" to

"4. System Design"

Author Response

Dear Sir

We thank you for the generous comments on the manuscript and have edited the manuscript to address the concerns.

"Please see the attachment"

We believe that the manuscript is now suitable for publication.

On behalf of all the authors:

Dr. Nayyar Ahmed Khan

Corresponding Author

[email protected] 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The authors acted on my comments.

Author Response

Dear Sir

We thank you for the generous comments on the manuscript and have edited the manuscript to address the concerns.

Please see the attachment.

REVIEW 4

We have updated the minor corrections for spelling and English grammar as well. 

We believe that the manuscript is now suitable for publication.

On behalf of all the authors:

Dr. Nayyar Ahmed Khan

Corresponding Author

[email protected] 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx