Will the Blockchain Take over My Body?

Despite advances in medicine and healthcare wearables that can measure everything from our sleeping habits to our breathing patterns to our blood pressure, we suffer from heart disease, diabetes and obesity at alarmingly high rates. Globally, cardiovascular disease accounts for 31% of all deaths, cementing an expanding market for the pharmaceutical makers, doctors and hospitals.

But the healthcare industry is rife with inefficiencies and fraud. Dreams of bureaucratic overhauls via blockchain solutions have created a slate of players to address supply-chain management, reshape the distribution of medical records and improve biomarkers that spot disease, mutations and aging.

If technologists are successful, the blockchain will profoundly influence our bodies. It will affect the foods and drugs we ingest by identifying fake products and breaches in shipping protocols, such as package tampering or overheating, and radically change how we access personal information about our well-being.

The healthcare blockchain ecosystem is dense yet largely theoretical with real-world use cases remaining limited.

Projects in development:

Genecoin – platform for perpetual backups of DNA sequences across the Bitcoin cryptocurrency network

Patientory – health information management system

Modum – data integrity for supply chain operations

Zenome – peer-to-peer technology to automate collection and sharing of genomic data by allowing user to upload their own DNA profiles

Bitfury – researching tool in collaboration with AI-based products to study aging

Doc.ai – natural-language processing platform for quantified biology to decentralize artificial intelligence

EncrypGen – next generation software for genomic data

Healthcoin – platform to measure, manage, and reward prevention of diabetes as users submit their biomarkers