Fog and IoT-based Remote Patient Monitoring Architecture Using Speech Recognition

Abstract

Health care services have become a high demand due to the rise in medical technology. As a result, related resources are being depleted. Hospitals no longer have any space to accommodate for incoming patients. Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) is a solution to this issue by creating a convenient and easy to access healthcare service. However, RPM systems are constrained by concerns on patient privacy, response time, and patient-service interaction. Patients emphasize their privacy, which requires health care services to maintain the confidentiality of their patient’s information. Wearable health monitors continuously transmit data. This feature results in high volumes of data transmissions towards the servers. In the current state of wearable devices, there is a lack of giving the patient an integrated means of interacting with the healthcare centre and vice versa. In this paper, we propose an architecture that uses fog computing and Internet of Things (IoT) devices to an already existing RPM system and addresses these challenges. The introduced system enables the health care providers to verify any of their data through a local server before it is reported to the main server. Also, this design incorporates a data filter that controls the outgoing data to maintain patient privacy. Finally, the inclusion of a local server offloads the extra data processing that is required from the server for a better flow of data. Tests in latency were executed to investigate the feasibility of a scalable fog architecture against a standard cloud-device setup. The results show that the proposed fog setup yielded significantly lower latencies under an increasing number of RPM rooms compared to the cloud setup. Results further support the fog and IoT-based architecture as a potential option for a scalable RPM.