Containing Future Epidemics with Trustworthy Federated Systems for Ubiquitous Warning and Response

TL;DR

This paper proposes a trustworthy, decentralized federated digital platform leveraging wireless connectivity and citizen participation to improve epidemic detection and response, exemplified through remote patient monitoring with blockchain and IoT technologies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel federated system architecture for epidemic management that balances decentralization, trustworthiness, and citizen involvement, integrating blockchain and IoT for real-time monitoring.

Findings

End-to-end latency slightly increases with more endorsed peers.

System maintains reliability, privacy, and interoperability.

Active citizen participation enhances epidemic response effectiveness.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a global digital platform to avoid and combat epidemics by providing relevant real-time information to support selective lockdowns. It leverages the pervasiveness of wireless connectivity while being trustworthy and secure. The proposed system is conceptualized to be decentralized yet federated, based on ubiquitous public systems and active citizen participation. Its foundations lie on the principle of informational self-determination. We argue that only in this way it can become a trustworthy and legitimate public good infrastructure for citizens by balancing the asymmetry of the different hierarchical levels within the federated organization while providing highly effective detection and guiding mitigation measures towards graceful lockdown of the society. To exemplify the proposed system, we choose the remote patient monitoring as use case. In which, the integration of distributed ledger technologies with narrowband IoT technology is evaluated considering different number of endorsed peers. An experimental proof of concept setup is used to evaluate the performance of this integration, in which the end-to-end latency is slightly increased when a new endorsed element is added. However, the system reliability, privacy, and interoperability are guaranteed. In this sense, we expect active participation of empowered citizens to supplement the more usual top-down management of epidemics.