A Federated Learning Framework for Privacy-Preserving Patient Monitoring with Lightweight Blockchain Anchoring

Information from the abstract

This paper proposes a federated learning framework for privacy-preserving patient monitoring with lightweight blockchain anchoring. The framework keeps synthetic patient monitoring records local at each client and uses federated model aggregation to support collaborative learning without centralizing raw records. To improve traceability, the blockchain layer is specified as an anchoring mechanism that records compact evidence, including model hashes and participation metadata, rather than raw data or full model parameters. Experiments were conducted on synthetic patient monitoring data to evaluate framework behavior under non-IID client distributions, label noise, different client counts, partial client participation, and aggregation strategies. The centralized MLP baseline achieved approximately 0.89 overall accuracy but failed to detect alert cases, with 0% alert-class recall, showing that accuracy alone can be misleading in imbalanced monitoring scenarios. In the federated simulations, the model reached approximately 0.99 accuracy under clean labels, approximately 0.90 under 10% label noise, and approximately 0.70 under 30% label noise. Under a more difficult noisy, non-IID, dropout, and fixed skewed-client evaluation setting, the model stabilized at approximately 0.80 accuracy after 25 communication rounds. Client scaling from 5 to 20 clients remained stable, and FedAvg, weighted aggregation, and accuracy-trimmed robust aggregation produced similar final accuracy of approximately 0.98 in the 10-client setting. The results indicate that label quality strongly affects federated convergence, while blockchain anchoring should be interpreted as an auditability mechanism rather than a direct accuracy-improving component. This study provides a framework-level foundation for auditable federated patient monitoring in semi-trusted healthcare networks.

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Related topics: Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data · Machine Learning in Healthcare · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security