MiPasa: Building a Block Chain to Verify COVID-19

Antosh Madappa Dyade,

Assistant Professor, CSE Department, SVERI’s College of Engineering, Pandharpur

 

On March 27, 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO), USA Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Hong Kong Department of Health, Government of Canada and John Hopkins University partnered with technology companies IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Hacera formed a blockchain consortium called MiPasa.

MiPasa is to share data concerning the coronavirus pandemic.

MiPasa is a global-scale control and communication system that enables a swift and more precise early detection of COVID-19 carriers and infection hotspots through seamless and fully private information sharing between individuals, state authorities and health institutions such as hospitals and HMOs, utilizing advanced technological tools and a dedicated user app.

MiPasa is designed to solve one of the main problems facing clinicians, scientists and researchers: “the lack of integration of verified data sources that can be used with confidence.”

MiPasa is maintained by a group of health experts across different disciplines, software and app developers, and privacy specialists who are all acting together to obtain secure and quality data, and make it readily available to relevant entities.

IBM said MiPasa “helping hospitals prioritize resources and letting individuals know whether it’s really critical for them to get a test,”

MiPasa validates the data by reconciling disparate data sources, such as figures from WHO, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others and ensuring new data matches the original. It also encourages validation comes by individuals who can report inconsistencies or bad data.

According to MiPasa, the tool can assist technologists, data scientists and government health officials by providing them with the data they require at scale to answer and devise solutions that can help overcome the outbreak of COVID-19.

MiPasa is written on top of Linux Hyperledger Fabric and attempts to facilitate quick detection of COVID-19 transmitters and epidemic hotspots.

The major benefit of using a blockchain-enabled platform is that it provides verifiable data because the distributed ledger technology allows for multiple parties to collaborate over the validity of rapidly updating data.

References:

1.https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2020/03/mipasa-project-and-ibm-blockchain-team-on open-data-platform-to-support-covid-19-response/

2.https://mipasa.org/

3.https://gcn.com/articles/2020/04/06/mipasa-blockchain-covid-tracking.aspx