A Blockchain-Based Smart Ambulance System to Combat Infectious Diseases

Infectious diseases can appear suddenly, spreading harm from a single household to multiple countries. The world has seen this happen repeatedly, starting from influenza and tuberculosis to more recent out-breaks of Ebola, cholera, and COVID-19. While many precautions have been taken to protect against these attacks, ambulance management has remained overlooked, despite being the first line of defense. This paper proposes a Smart Ambulance System designed to facilitate primary clinical investigation and real-time patient monitoring during the critical transit period before hospital arrival. To address the sensitive nature of epidemiological data, a blockchain-based security architecture is integrated into the system, ensuring data confidentiality and integrity, and enabling a decentralized environment for cross-institutional information sharing. The proposed system is simulated using the Ethereum platform to demonstrate its feasibility in managing emergency medical resources during infectious disease surges. Comprehensive evaluations of time, storage, and propagation complexity are provided, validating the efficiency and scalability of the blockchain-enabled framework in modern emergency medical services.