Fog Assisted-IoT Enabled Patient Health Monitoring in Smart Homes

Internet of Things (IoT) technology provides a competent and structured approach to handle service deliverance aspects of healthcare in terms of mobile health and remote patient monitoring. IoT generates an unprecedented amount of data that can be processed using cloud computing. But for realtime remote health monitoring applications, the delay caused by transferring data to the cloud and back to the application is unacceptable. Relative to this context, we proposed the remote patient health monitoring in smart homes by using the concept of fog computing at the smart gateway. The proposed model uses advanced techniques and services, such as embedded data mining, distributed storage, and notification services at the edge of the network. Event triggering-based data transmission methodology is adopted to process the patient's real-time data at fog layer. Temporal mining concept is used to analyze the events adversity by calculating the temporal health index of the patient. In order to determine the validity of the system, health data of 67 patients in IoT-based smart home environment was systematically generated for 30 days. Results depict that the proposed Bayesian belief network classifier-based model has high accuracy and response time in determining the state of an event when compared with other classification algorithms. Moreover, decision making based on real-time healthcare data further enhances the utility of the proposed system.

I. Introduction

Cisco coined the term fog computing which allows software applications to run on the edge of the network devices rather than on cloud computing datacenters. Fog computing not only brings the cloud computing paradigm to the edge of the network but also addresses unsupported or unfit fundamentals of cloud paradigm. The problems like edge location, high latency, location awareness, reliability, and moving data to the best location for processing are resolved by fog computing [1], [2]. Fog can be described as placing light-weight cloud like facility at the proximity of the mobile users. Indispensably, fog is deployed at location sites, by providing engaged localization services desirable to mobile users. Fog-based Internet of Things (IoT) system consists of three layers namely device layer, fog layer, and cloud layer, as shown in Fig. 1. The fog layer first analyses the health data collected from various IoT and medical sensors only notifies the cloud layer in case of an adverse event happening situation. Fig. 1.

Fog computing basic model.