Design of a Fog Computing, Blockchain and IoT-Based Continuous Glucose Monitoring System for Crowdsourcing mHealth

Diabetes Mellitus, usually called only Diabetes, is a worldwide chronic metabolic disorder that is characterized by abnormal oscillations in blood sugar levels. Such levels should be monitored by diabetes patients, which traditionally have had to take blood samples by finger-pricking at least between twice and four times a day. Finger-pricking has a number of drawbacks that can be tackled by Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs), which are able to determine blood sugar levels throughout the day and not only at specific time instants. In this paper it is proposed the design of an IoT CGM-based system whose collected blood sugar sample values can be accessed remotely, thus being able to monitor patients, specifically dependent ones (e.g., children, elders, pregnant women) and warn them in case a dangerous situation is detected. In order to create such a system, a fog computing system based on distributed mobile smart phones has been devised to collect data from the CGMs. Moreover, it is proposed the use of a blockchain to receive, validate and store the collected data with the objective of avoiding untrusted sources and, thus, provide a transparent and trustworthy data source of a population, which can vary in age, ethnicity, psychology, education, self-care and/or geographic location, in a rapid, flexible, scalable and low-cost way. These crowdsourced data can enable novel mHealth applications for diagnosis, patient monitoring or even public health actions that help to advance in the control of the disease and raise global awareness on the increasing prevalence of diabetes.