journal article Mar 27, 2026

A Blockchain-Based Smart Ambulance System to Combat Infectious Diseases

View at Publisher Save 10.35377/saucis...1869683
Abstract
Infectious diseases can appear suddenly, spreading harm from a single household to multiple countries. The world has seen this happen repeatedly, starting from influenza and tuberculosis to more recent out-breaks of Ebola, cholera, and COVID-19. While many precautions have been taken to protect against these attacks, ambulance management has remained overlooked, despite being the first line of defense. This paper proposes a Smart Ambulance System designed to facilitate primary clinical investigation and real-time patient monitoring during the critical transit period before hospital arrival. To address the sensitive nature of epidemiological data, a blockchain-based security architecture is integrated into the system, ensuring data confidentiality and integrity, and enabling a decentralized environment for cross-institutional information sharing. The proposed system is simulated using the Ethereum platform to demonstrate its feasibility in managing emergency medical resources during infectious disease surges. Comprehensive evaluations of time, storage, and propagation complexity are provided, validating the efficiency and scalability of the blockchain-enabled framework in modern emergency medical services.
Topics

No keywords indexed for this article. Browse by subject →

References
36
[1]
I. A. Reshi, A. M. Malla, S. Sholla, and A. A. Banka, “Harnessing blockchain for resilient emergency message dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks,” International Journal of Vehicle Information and Communication Systems, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 206–225, 2025. 10.1504/ijvics.2025.145796
[2]
E. King, C. Moore, and W. Carter, “Revolutionizing healthcare with 6g: A deep dive into smart, connected systems,” IEEE Access, vol. 4, no. 1, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://dergi.neu.edu.tr/index.php/aiit/article/view/922
[3]
M. Ahmed, R. Khan, and T. Hussain, “Development of a blockchain-secured system for reliable and transparent ambulance resource allocation and tracking,” ResearchGate, March 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389989144
[4]
C. Esposito, A. De Santis, G. Tortora, H. Chang, and K.-K. R. Choo, “Blockchain: A panacea for healthcare cloud-based data security and privacy?” IEEE Cloud Computing, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 31–37, 2018. 10.1109/mcc.2018.011791712
[5]
S. Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” Tech. Rep., 2019.
[6]
A. Dubovitskaya, Z. Xu, S. Ryu, M. Schumacher, and F. Wang, “Secure and trustable electronic medical records sharing using blockchain,” in AMIA annual symposium proceedings, vol. 2017. American Medical Informatics Association, 2017, p. 650.
[7]
H. Kaur, M. A. Alam, R. Jameel, A. K. Mourya, and V. Chang, “A proposed solution and future direction for blockchain-based heterogeneous medicare data in cloud environment,” Journal of Medical Systems, vol. 42, no. 8, pp. 1–11, 2018. 10.1007/s10916-018-1007-5
[8]
K. Mohammad Hossein, M. Esmaeili, T. Dargahi, and Khonsari, “Blockchain-based privacy-preserving healthcare architecture,” in Proc. IEEE Canadian Conf. Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE), 2019. 10.1109/ccece.2019.8861857
[9]
MeDShare: Trust-Less Medical Data Sharing Among Cloud Service Providers via Blockchain

Qi Xia, Emmanuel Boateng Sifah, Kwame Omono Asamoah et al.

IEEE Access 10.1109/access.2017.2730843
[10]
Y. Luo, H. Jin, and P. Li, “A blockchain future for secure clinical data sharing: A position paper,” in Proceedings of the ACM International Workshop on Security in Software Defined Networks & Network Function Virtualization, 2019, pp. 23–27. 10.1145/3309194.3309198
[11]
D. Grishin et al., “Accelerating genomic data generation and facilitating genomic data access using decentralization, privacy-preserving technologies and equitable compensation,” Blockchain in Healthcare Today, vol. 1, pp. 1–23, 2018. 10.30953/bhty.v1.34
[12]
M. A. Ferrag, M. Derdour, M. Mukherjee, A. Derhab, L. Maglaras, and H. Janicke, “Blockchain technologies for the internet of things: Research issues and challenges,” IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 2188–2204, 2018. 10.1109/jiot.2018.2882794
[13]
Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Comprehensive Review and Directions for Future Research

Seyednima Khezr, Md Moniruzzaman, Abdulsalam Yassine et al.

Applied Sciences 10.3390/app9091736
[14]
T. T. A. Dinh, R. Liu, M. Zhang, G. Chen, B. C. Ooi, and J. Wang, “Untangling blockchain: A data processing view of blockchain systems,” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, vol. 30, no. 7, pp. 1366–1385, 2018. 10.1109/tkde.2017.2781227
[15]
A. Mubarakali, S. C. Bose, K. Srinivasan, A. Elsir, and O. Elsier, “Design a secure and efficient health record transaction utilizing block chain (sehrtb) algorithm for health record transaction in block chain,” Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, vol. 15, no. Suppl. 1, p. 59, 2024. 10.1007/s12652-019-01420-0
[16]
N. Sharma and P. G. Shambharkar, “Towards secure healthcare: Sa-gbo-odbn model utilizing blockchain and deep learning for data handling and diagnosis,” The Computer Journal, vol. 68, no. 10, pp. 1386–1423, 2025. 10.1093/comjnl/bxaf045
[17]
L. Zhang and X. Wang, “A combined blockchain and zero-knowledge model for healthcare b2b and b2c data sharing,” Journal of Cybersecurity and Privacy, 2025.
[18]
L. Nkenyereye, B. Adhi Tama, M. K. Shahzad, and Y.-H. Choi, “Secure and blockchain-based emergency driven message protocol for 5g enabled vehicular edge computing,” Sensors, vol. 20, no. 1:154, 2020. 10.3390/s20010154
[19]
A. Akhter, M. Ahmed, A. Shah, A. Anwar, A. Kayes, and A. Zengin, “A blockchain-based authentication protocol for cooperative vehicular ad hoc network,” Sensors, vol. 21, no. 4:1273, 2021. 10.3390/s21041273
[20]
A. Akhter, M. Ahmed, A. Shah, A. Anwar, and A. Zengin, “A secured privacy-preserving multi-level blockchain framework for cluster based vanet,” Sustainability, vol. 13, no. 1:400, 2021. 10.3390/su13010400
[21]
M. Ho¨ lbl, M. Kompara, A. Kamisˇalic´, and L. Nemec Zlatolas, “A systematic review of the use of blockchain in healthcare,” Symmetry, vol. 10, no. 10:470, 2018. 10.3390/sym10100470
[22]
H. N. Saha, N. F. Raun, and M. Saha, “Monitoring patient’s health with smart ambulance system using internet of things (iots),” in 2017 8th Annual Industrial Automation and Electromechanical Engineering Conference (IEMECON). IEEE, 2017, pp. 91–95. 10.1109/iemecon.2017.8079568
[23]
M. A. Usman, N. Y. Philip, and C. Politis, “5g enabled mobile healthcare for ambulances,” in 2019 IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps), 2019, pp. 1–6. 10.1109/gcwkshps45667.2019.9024584
[24]
D. M. West, “How 5g technology enables the health internet of things,” Brookings Center for Technology Innovation, vol. 3, no. 1, p. 20, 2016.
[25]
Truffle Suite, “Truffle Suite,” https://www.trufflesuite.com/ , 2026, accessed: Jan. 8, 2026.
[26]
J. Papa, “GitHub Lightweight Node Server,” [Online]. Available: https://github.com/johnpapa/lite-server , 2026, accessed: Jan. 8, 2026.
[27]
npm, Inc., “NPM (Software),” [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm (software), 2026, accessed: 2026-01-08.
[28]
ConsenSys, “MetaMask,,” [Online]. Available: https://metamask.io/ , 2026, accessed: Jan. 8, 2026.
[29]
R. K. Nirala and M. D. Ansari, “Performance evaluation of loss packet percentage for asymmetric key cryptography in vanet,” in Proc. IEEE PDGC, 2018, pp. 70–74. 10.1109/pdgc.2018.8745798
[30]
C. Wang, J. Shen, J.-F. Lai, and J. Liu, “B-tsca: Blockchain assisted trustworthiness scalable computation for v2i authentication in vanets,” IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, 2020. 10.1109/tetc.2020.2978866
[31]
M. Azees, P. Vijayakumar, and L. J. Deboarh, “Eaap: Efficient anonymous authentication with conditional privacy-preserving scheme for vehicular ad hoc networks,” IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, vol. 18, no. 9, pp. 2467–2476, 2017. 10.1109/tits.2016.2634623
[32]
X. Zhang and X. Chen, “Data security sharing and storage based on a consortium blockchain in a vehicular ad-hoc network,” IEEE Access, vol. 7, pp. 58 241–58 254, 2019. 10.1109/access.2018.2890736
[33]
C. Zhang, R. Lu, X. Lin, P.-H. Ho, and X. Shen, “An efficient identity-based batch verification scheme for vehicular sensor networks,” in IEEE INFOCOM 2008-The 27th Conference on Computer Communications, 2008, pp. 246–250. 10.1109/infocom.2008.58
[34]
J. Shao, X. Lin, R. Lu, and C. Zuo, “A threshold anonymous authentication protocol for vanets,” IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. 65, no. 3, pp. 1711–1720, 2015. 10.1109/tvt.2015.2405853
[35]
L. Rongxing, L. Xiaodong, and S. Xuemin, “Spring: A social-based privacy-preserving packet forwarding protocol for vehicular delay tolerant networks,” in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM, 2010, pp. 1–9. 10.1109/infcom.2010.5462161
[36]
M. Patel and J. Wang, “Applications, challenges, and prospective in emerging body area networking technologies,” IEEE Wireless Communications, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 80–88, 2010. 10.1109/mwc.2010.5416354
Metrics
0
Citations
36
References
Details
Published
Mar 27, 2026
Vol/Issue
(Advanced Online Publication)
Pages
205-215
Cite This Article
A F M Suaib Akhter (2026). A Blockchain-Based Smart Ambulance System to Combat Infectious Diseases. Sakarya University Journal of Computer and Information Sciences(Advanced Online Publication), 205-215. https://doi.org/10.35377/saucis...1869683