Chapter 2 - Geolocation-aware IoT and cloud-fog-based solutions for healthcare

Abstract

With increasing health awareness, a large volume of healthcare data is being generated through different types of healthcare devices using new technologies. IoT devices, such as smart watches, are used to collect health data from the patient and send the data to the cloud-fog environment for the diagnosis of diseases. In emergency cases, analysis of some health data can be done in the fog devices; otherwise, the health data are forwarded to the cloud servers. After the diagnosis, doctors can prescribe medicines or take immediate actions like hospitalization for patients. Our proposed model is a geolocation-aware healthcare system with IoT and fog-cloud-based diagnosis. A medical team can be sent to the patient’s location depending upon the severity of the health condition. Also, the nearest hospital or medical facility available to the patient can be identified. This will help the patient’s family or caregivers to take action immediately in both urban and rural areas. An end-to-end infrastructure has been modeled for this healthcare system using geolocation-enabled IoT, fog, and cloud computing technology. This system has achieved 25%–27% less delay and 27%–29% less power consumption than the only-cloud environment.