A CoviReader Architecture Based on IOTA Tangle for Outbreak Control in Smart Cities during COVID-19 Pandemic

Background: Reportedly, many of the data collected for detecting infected people are being used for other than healthcare purposes. On the other hand, fabricated digital COVID-19 test results will pose a danger to vulnerable people and to public health. This paper presents a CoviReader architecture designed for a smart city health information management system to manage outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic while protecting citizens' privacy and tamper-proofing their health status data. Methods: We used IOTA as an infrastructure for data management. We introduced two plans: "Transaction Plan", handling daily interactions of citizens in a smart city and "Big Data Plan", providing the COVID-19 crisis headquarters with the aggregated data for curbing the pandemic. Results: Through the proposed CoviReader architecture people's using IOTA tangle, people's health status data are readily available to the crisis headquarters and verification of the validity of the final file against data manipulation will also be possible by comparing the hash of the consolidated received file with the original hash of the file registered in the IOTA Tangle. Reported plans were capable of handling tamper proofed data delivery. Conclusion: The proposed CoviReader architecture ensures the availability and at the same time constrains manipulation of data. The provided solution aids healthcare providers to control pandemic and at the same time to preserve commuting people's data for any unintended or illegal identity disclosure.