Medical waste management has grave issues concerning traceability, regulatory, and the environment. The traditional systems which are centered on manual record-keeping and the usage of centralized databases usually lead to data loss and unauthorized disposal along with inefficiencies. In this paper, the researcher comes up with a blockchain-integrated medical waste management system to support Internet of Things (IoT)-driven technologies and smart contracts to streamline a safe, autonomous, and anti-tampering system of waste handling. Smart bins enabled with IoT and fitted with GPS, ultrasonic and weight sensors collect live data regarding waste creation and conveyance and this information is transferred or relayed through Wi-Fi/LoRaWAN to the edge/cloud gateways. This data is stored in a protected manner, verified on a permissioned blockchain and, most importantly, the most important tasks, such as scheduling a pickup and approving disposal are done within smart contracts. Experiment findings show 100 percent traceability accuracy, a 30 percent less time in disposal, and a 90 percent better regulatory compliance. The proposed framework will have three new contributions as compared to the existing systems, augmenting the route validation algorithm with a live tracking device in the form of GPS to detect and prevent deviation, a neural network-based model to pre-validate transactions and prevent fraud, and an optimization layer within the smart contract that will support the energy cost to ensure scalability of the proposed framework. The said features altogether allow smart, anticipatory, and regulation-conformant waste processing, which makes this work stand out of existing methods.
M Lakshmanan (Tue,) studied this question.