Designing a Private and Secure Personal Health Records Access Management System: A Solution Based on IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper presents a PHR access management system based on IOTA DLT. The paper is structured more as a technical report. It describes the designed system from a technical point of view. It discusses its advantages and disadvantages. However it is not compared with other possible solutions, e.g. the ones that are already in the IOTA ecosystem https://www.iota.org/solutions/ehealth (Skaly, SmartOptz, Pact etc. how is it different ?) nor is it evaluated from a technical/perfomance point of view (e.g. what about CPU, RAM, energy consumption?)

Authors should evaluate their solution against other solutions / research in order to prove that it advances the state of the art

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The current work focuses on the Designing Private and Secure Personal Health Records Access Management System: A Solution Based on IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology.The experimental work appears to have been carried out well. However, a few points deserve attention for further publication. I suggest that it is accepted for publication after the following revisions:

 

- ABSTRACT: Designing Private and Secure Personal Health Records Access Management System: A Solution Based on IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology: What parameters were optimized? Authors must include numbers with the results found. Stability of the Management System? How much Management System were utilized to process? Furthermore, what are the conditions of reactions? Temperature, pH, ionic strength, for example. This information should be included in the abstract.

 

- INTRODUCTION:

- In this study, Designing Private and Secure Personal Health Records Access Management System: A Solution Based on IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology? What the advantages? These strategies used should be better explained in the manuscript.

 

- Management System are very special, having a peculiar mechanism of action. This information must be clear in the introduction to present manuscript.

 

- A paragraph describing the properties, application, mechanism of actuation to Management System must be included in the manuscript. Please, include here:

 

- What is the origin of this Management System? Is it a comercial? Modified? How was it produced?

- Management System: What optimization strategy was used? Why was it used? This information needs to be explained in the introduction of the manuscript.

 

- Management System: The new material presented were compared with a commercial material? This information must be clear in the introduction.

 

 

- The contribution and importance of these studies in the work performed must be explained in the introduction of the manuscript.

 

 

- RESULTS AND DISCUSSION:

- The Enhanced stability of Management System showed how about stability ?

 

- Comparison of the Management System in terms of parameters: Authors need to compare these results with other results in the literature.

 

- Was determined the full loading of Management System prepared under the optimized conditions? This information must be clear in the manuscript.

 

- Enhanced stability of Management System: Other factors that cause the loss of durability and stability of the Management System should be explained in the manuscript.

 

- Please, check all references according to the author's instructions.

- Include more details in the figures (error bars) and tables captions.

 

- The manuscript must be formatted according to the journal's standards.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Sensors-2267711- Designing Private and Secure Personal Health Records Access Management System: A Solution Based on IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology by  Serkan Akbulut , Farida Habib Semantha * , Sami Azam * , Iris Cathrina Abacan Pilares , Mirjam Jonkman , Kheng Cher Yeo , Bharanidharan Shanmugam

This paper deals with the development of a framework for securing both patient medical records and Internet of Things (IoT) medical devices to develop an access management system that provides patients with full control of their medical records by attacking a current issue about the privacy and security of patient medical records. In the development of the work, four applications were developed to demonstrate the framework in terms of the web appointment application, the patient application, the physician application, and the remote medical IoT device application.

General Comments:

 

This reviewer considers that the work has practical contribution in the short term and the contribution is related to the use of the internet of things in the application to the management of biometric patient health data. Although the manuscript is very long, the methodology is clearly detailed, which makes the work repeatable, increasing its scientific contribution. I consider that the manuscript has the necessary quality and contribution to be considered for publication. 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors still present a mainly technical work with no evaluation of its performance. It is merely a technical presentation of an application, which is not adequate for a scientific journal.

Authors should consider evaluating their work considering a set of performance metrics (and ideally comparing against others). In my previous review I have recommended classical performance metrics (CPU, RAM) but also distributed ledger-based ones (transaction throughput etc.)

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf