SHIELD-Health: Secure Healthcare IoT with Energy-efficient Ledger-based Distributed Federated Learning

SHIELD-Health: Secure Healthcare IoT with Energy-efficient Ledger-based Distributed Federated Learning | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Article SHIELD-Health: Secure Healthcare IoT with Energy-efficient Ledger-based Distributed Federated Learning Tushar Mali, Nitin Rathore, Jasvant Mandloi, Ashwin Verma, Ebrahim A. Mattar, and 1 more This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-8533915/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract Healthcare Internet of Things (HIoT) has revolutionized patient care through continuous monitoring and personalized treatment, but it introduces critical challenges in privacy protection, data security, and resource management across heterogeneous devices. Traditional centralized machine learning (ML) approaches face significant limitations due to privacy regulations and security concerns, leading to the emergence of federated learning (FL) and blockchain (BC) as complementary solutions. While FL enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data, and BC provides immutable verification and secure record management. We present SHIELD-Health, a novel framework that synergistically integrates these technologies to create a comprehensive solution for secure analytics in healthcare environments, featuring four key innovations: (1) resource-aware computation that dynamically adapts to device capabilities (2) a multi-layered privacy architecture designed for differential privacy and secure aggregation (3) Byzantine-robust aggregation ensuring model integrity under adversarial conditions, and (4) healthcare-specific optimizations including temporal attention mechanisms for physiological time-series data. Extensive evaluation demonstrates exceptional performance across multiple dimensions, maintaining high accuracy while achieving substantial communication efficiency and energy savings for resource-constrained devices. The framework also shows remarkable resilience against poisoning attacks, and robust performance under challenging non-independent and identically distributed (IID) data distributions common in healthcare scenarios. It represents a significant advancement in privacy-preserving collaborative analytics for sensitive medical applications where security, privacy, and resource constraints are paramount considerations. Biological sciences/Computational biology and bioinformatics Physical sciences/Engineering Health sciences/Health care Physical sciences/Mathematics and computing Full Text Additional Declarations No competing interests reported. Supplementary Files SHIELDHealthSecureHealthcareIoTwithEnergyefficientLedgerbasedDistributedFederatedLearning1.pdf Cite Share Download PDF Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Research Square lets you share your work early, gain feedback from the community, and start making changes to your manuscript prior to peer review in a journal. As a division of Research Square Company, we’re committed to making research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. We do this by developing innovative software and high quality services for the global research community. Our growing team is made up of researchers and industry professionals working together to solve the most critical problems facing scientific publishing. Also discoverable on Platform About Our Team In Review Editorial Policies Advisory Board Help Center Resources Author Services Accessibility API Access RSS feed Manage Cookie Preferences © Research Square 2026 | ISSN 2693-5015 (online) Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information {"props":{"pageProps":{"initialData":{"identity":"rs-8533915","acceptedTermsAndConditions":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"archivedVersions":[],"articleType":"Article","associatedPublications":[],"authors":[{"id":577556595,"identity":"c6bc5027-a956-4f2c-9114-edb22a0facba","order_by":0,"name":"Tushar Mali","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"Nirma University","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Tushar","middleName":"","lastName":"Mali","suffix":""},{"id":577556596,"identity":"ab0a2b9a-a7cf-4e4e-a473-2ee976e6b456","order_by":1,"name":"Nitin Rathore","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"Nirma University","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Nitin","middleName":"","lastName":"Rathore","suffix":""},{"id":577556597,"identity":"ff403508-e1fe-4e4b-9bcd-e014256c7f1b","order_by":2,"name":"Jasvant Mandloi","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"Government Polytechnic","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Jasvant","middleName":"","lastName":"Mandloi","suffix":""},{"id":577556598,"identity":"282bf6bd-ae32-4b07-ab2d-71f0309d690d","order_by":3,"name":"Ashwin Verma","email":"data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAZAAAAAyAQMAAABI0h/eAAAABlBMVEX///8AAABVwtN+AAAACXBIWXMAAA7EAAAOxAGVKw4bAAABC0lEQVRIiWNgGAWjYFACHgaGBBj7A4MEhAEWYSZCC+MMorXAADMPLkXIgL//7DGJhzsYEvulTyd+tt1hka/bfsbswQMGO3kGdt4D2LRI3MhLk0g8w5A4sy93s3TuGQnLbWdyzA0SGJING5j5ErBpYbjBY3YjsY3B2OAM7wbp3DYJA7MDOWYSCQzMQMRjgE2H/PkzEC32Z3g3/7YEaTn/BqSlHqcWA6CZIC1yBjy826QZQVpugG05jFOL4Y0c8x+JbRJyEmd4t1n2grU8K5NIMDhu2IZDi9z5M8aGP9tsePh7eDff+NlWB3RY8jbJHxXV8vz8Z7BqgQUchoMZGNjwqB8Fo2AUjIJRgB8AANd9UyUrHSMpAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC","orcid":"","institution":"Nirma University","correspondingAuthor":true,"prefix":"","firstName":"Ashwin","middleName":"","lastName":"Verma","suffix":""},{"id":577556599,"identity":"38924aa6-9bbb-432c-983a-a91203f41bbf","order_by":4,"name":"Ebrahim A. 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