A Blockchain-Based Federated Learning Method for Smart Healthcare

Abstract

The development of artificial intelligence and worldwide epidemic events has promoted the implementation of smart healthcare while bringing issues of data privacy, malicious attack, and service quality. The Medical Internet of Things (MIoT), along with the technologies of federated learning and blockchain, has become a feasible solution for these issues. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based federated learning method for smart healthcare in which the edge nodes maintain the blockchain to resist a single point of failure and MIoT devices implement the federated learning to make full of the distributed clinical data. In particular, we design an adaptive differential privacy algorithm to protect data privacy and gradient verification-based consensus protocol to detect poisoning attacks. We compare our method with two similar methods on a real-world diabetes dataset. Promising experimental results show that our method can achieve high model accuracy in acceptable running time while also showing good performance in reducing the privacy budget consumption and resisting poisoning attacks.