Using Freenet as a Broker for Multi-Party Data Exchange in IoT for Health

Smart, networked medical devices play a rapidly growing role in healthcare. Those devices and their data have to be integrated into the healthcare system. There are several reasons to reuse those data for well-defined purposes by well-defined partners; this reuse should be controlled by the patient and not depend on the manufacturer infrastructure. Different stakeholders have an understandable reason to access those data under the control of the patient. The authors propose an architecture of a decentralized data broker that receives the data streams from the devices and redistributes them securely to legitimate recipients. This broker is based on the peer-to-peer network Freenet. This network has been defined to be censorship resistant and to protect the privacy of persons sharing data. This covers the needs for protection expected from a secure data broker. The patient can directly define which of the stakeholders will receive which information and the information is encrypted in a way that only that partner can read it.