This systematic review explores the use of blockchain in this context. The objective is to determine to which extent this technology has fulfilled the potential of blockchain to bring these new added-value services. The authors explored 5 repositories in search of papers describing solutions applied to the above-mentioned frame. 17 papers were selected for full-text analysis, and they displayed diverse applications of blockchain, such as Fitness and healthcare, Sport, and Active ageing. A detailed analysis shows that the solutions found do not leverage all the possibilities of blockchain technology. Most of the solutions analyzed use blockchain for managing, sharing, and controlling access to data and do not exploit the possibilities of Smart Contracts or oracles. Additionally, the advantages of the blockchain model have not been fully exploited to engage users using approaches such as gamification.įrom the point of view of the authors, this area can take advantage of this technology as it provides with features such as decentralization, transparency, open source, autonomy, immutability and anonymity. Using these features, it would be possible to implement services that may play a relevant role in this area, such as, the secure storage of sport results without the need of a reliable third party involving (or not) decisions and consequences supporting gamification techniques, defined as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts”, among peers triggering alerts in a fully automatic and decentralized manner on data from sports or from biomedical sensors and others interesting services that may still be waiting to be discovered by the researchers of the domain. Nevertheless, it must be kept in mind that its inherent drawbacks, such as the difficulty of data deletion or the lack of privacy, should also be properly dealt with. Actually, there are several works that show its application in medicine for the management of electronic health records (eHR) and how it is possible to make significant contributions in this domain bearing the existing constraints.Įach time an agent involved in the system intends to introduce a new block in this so-called main ledger, it is necessary for all the nodes of the network to reach an agreement on the validity of this new block. This is done by means of a specific protocol that establishes the objective criteria for the acceptance or rejection of a block in the chain. This protocol, called consensus algorithm, can rely on different features or require different conditions to the nodes proposing the inclusion of a new block in the chain. Among the most popular algorithms of this type, there are two that account for most of these systems. The most common one is the so-called Proof of Work (PoW), which requires nodes (or miners in this model) to solve a complex mathematical problem to justify the inclusion of the new block in the network. This would be the model chosen for the famous Bitcoin network. Also, it is quite common to use the Proof of Authority (PoA) as a consensus algorithm. Under this model, the inclusion of new blocks of records are based on the relevance of the node proposing the new block.
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