Home monitoring generates activity data with value well beyond the individual alert — for research, service planning and product design. Sharing it raises two problems at once: the data must be stripped of anything that identifies a resident, and the exchange itself needs to happen without a trusted intermediary holding both the data and the money.
The M-Sec Marketplace is a blockchain-based exchange for anonymised IoT data. Anonymised raw activity data from the home sensors is published to the marketplace, where stakeholders interested in home activity data can purchase it using M-Sec Tokens, a cryptocurrency implemented as a smart contract on the blockchain. The smart contract checks that the buyer holds sufficient funds and settles the transaction by transferring the balance to the data owner.
The marketplace and its smart contracts were developed within M-Sec by researchers at Keio University, ICCS – National Technical University of Athens and CEA, and published together as a peer-reviewed study.
– Publication of anonymised IoT activity datasets
– M-Sec Tokens: a smart-contract cryptocurrency for settlement
– Automated fund verification and transfer to the data owner
– Disintermediated exchange — no broker holds both data and payment
– Ledger record of transactions for audit
Integrated with the Senior Care platform in the Santander home monitoring pilot (M-Sec Use Case 2), receiving anonymised activity data from participants’ home sensor kits. As with the blockchain middleware, the pilot exposed a deployment risk: the marketplace was hosted in Greece and went down during the 2021 wildfires, and a bridge had to be built at speed so the monitoring service could continue without it.
Get in touch to explore deployment opportunities or propose a complementary approach.
