Table 5.
The integration of blockchain and emerging technology.
| Emerging technology | Integrating with blockchain | The role of blockchain | Reference |
| AIa | Disease diagnosis and prediction, medical image–assisted reading, intelligent devices, new drug research, health management, and gene sequencing | Blockchain forms a natural foundation to standardize health data structures for AI training, clinical trials, and regulatory purposes. Blockchain-based AI could thereby accelerate the definition of phenotype-specific outcomes of orphan diseases, improve the representation of racial minorities, and reduce sex-specific inequalities | [94,95,98,99] |
| Cloud computing | Supporting communication and sharing data among stakeholders in health care | Based on the blockchain and cloud computing, the prediction model of disease evolution will be constructed, which plays a role in the prevention and control of major infectious diseases and tumors involving personal information | [82,83,100] |
| Big data | Offering a huge amount of data in real time to reduce health risks and optimize the outcome | Big data are stored and shared through a blockchain, thus avoiding the defect that centralized storage is easy to be lost and attacked | [77] |
| Wearable devices | Collecting personal data in an intimate and timely manner, the source of health data for telemedicine | Blockchain allows continuous individual monitoring, and requires robust, rapid, real-time analysis of physiological signals to avoid the storage of large amounts of data in a centralized system | [96] |
| Internet of Things | Supply chain and tracing of drugs, apparatuses, and wearable devices | Tracking the source and use of drugs and medical devices in the Internet of Things through blockchain technology to ensure authenticity and reliability | [88,100] |
| 5G | Improving the speed of medical information sharing | The distributed processing of medical data in the 5G environment is carried out by blockchain technology, and access and use can only be achieved by obtaining multiparty permissions | [97] |
aAI: artificial intelligence.