Healthcare Monitoring Through Fog Computing: A Survey

Abstract

Healthcare is one of the prominent areas which requires a lot of improvements in terms of fast delivery of services to clients like patients, doctors, and hospitals. As the technology is growing rapidly, a number of healthcare devices and equipment are also increasing. These healthcare devices produce large volume of patient data on daily basis. The processing of the patients data is required in real time for critical cases where a quick decision can increase the lifespan of the patient. But conventional model of healthcare architecture using Cloud computing is unable to process huge health data in real time. There are a number of solutions provided by researchers to improve performance of Cloud healthcare computing, such as Edge, Fog, Mist, and Dew computing. In this survey paper, the term Fog computing, its advantages, and standard architecture are explained in detail. Various other computing terms of Internet of Things (IoT) are discussed and compared with Fog computing. The survey also presents conventional Cloud healthcare architecture, its issues, and various proposed healthcare architectures in Fog computing, and discusses new technologies that can improve healthcare system. The results shows that most of the works focus on security of hospital database and reducing the delay of providing services that are very minimal on energy consumption and mobility of patients.