Advancement of IoT in Blockchain Technology and its Applications (p-ISSN: 3139-6550, e-ISSN: 2583-7826)

A Survey on Decentralized Electronic Health Record Management using Blockchain, Semantic Search, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Aiman Gulzar — 2026-09-16

The rapid growth of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), telemedicine, and digital healthcare services has significantly improved healthcare delivery while introducing critical challenges related to data security, privacy, interoperability, and patient data ownership. Traditional centralized healthcare systems are vulnerable to cyberattacks, unauthorized access, data breaches, and fragmented information sharing across healthcare providers. Emerging technologies such as Blockchain, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) provide promising solutions to address these limitations. Blockchain ensures secure, decentralized, and tamper-resistant management of healthcare records, while IPFS enables efficient decentralized storage of large medical files. RAG enhances intelligent medical information retrieval by combining large language models with external medical knowledge, producing accurate and context-aware responses for clinical decision support. This review paper presents a comprehensive analysis of recent research on blockchain-based healthcare systems, RAG-powered medical applications, decentralized storage technologies, and healthcare interoperability standards such as HL7 FHIR. It compares existing approaches, identifies their strengths and limitations, and highlights current research gaps. The review concludes that integrating blockchain, IPFS, interoperability standards, and RAG can significantly improve secure healthcare data management while supporting intelligent and patient-centric clinical decision-making. These findings provide the foundation for developing advanced frameworks for secure, decentralized, and interoperable healthcare systems.

EduChain: A Blockchain-Inspired Secure Academic Document Sharing and Verification Framework

Suraj R. Nalawade — 2026-09-24

The rapid shift from paper-based records to digital academic documents has made secure storage, verification, and controlled sharing increasingly important for educational institutions. Conventional approaches often depend on centralized databases and manual verification, which may make it difficult to detect unauthorized changes and may increase the time required to confirm the validity of records. This paper presents EduChain, a blockchain-inspired system designed for secure academic document management and verification. The proposed approach uses SHA-256 hashing to create a digital fingerprint of each registered document and applies hash comparison during verification to identify changes in document content. A Merkle-tree structure is included to organize document hashes and strengthen the integrity-verification process. The system also incorporates authentication and role-based access control so that document operations can be restricted to authorized users. An AI-based module is included to analyze academic information and provide performance-related insights and recommendations. The application follows a modular web architecture using React.js, Node.js, Express.js, and MongoDB. The prototype is intended to reduce dependence on manual verification while maintaining a clear separation between document management, security, verification, and analysis functions. The present work uses a simulated or blockchain-inspired verification layer rather than a production decentralized blockchain. Results and discussion therefore focus on the functional role of the modules and the observed workflow, while quantitative performance and AI-accuracy measurements are identified as areas for further experimental evaluation.