Towards fog-driven IoT eHealth:Promises and challenges of IoT in medicine and healthcare

Internet of Things (IoT) offers a seamless platform to connect people and objects to one another for enriching and making our lives easier. This vision carries us from compute-based centralized schemes to a more distributed environment offering a vast amount of applications such as smart wearables, smart home, smart mobility, and smart cities. In this paper we discuss applicability of IoT in healthcare and medicine by presenting a holistic architecture of IoT eHealth ecosystem. Healthcare is becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to insufficient and less effective healthcare services to meet the increasing demands of rising aging population with chronic diseases. We propose that this requires a transition from the clinic-centric treatment to patient-centric healthcare where each agent such as hospital, patient, and services are seamlessly connected to each other. This patient-centric IoT eHealth ecosystem needs a multi-layer architecture: (1) device, (2) fog computing and (3) cloud to empower handling of complex data in terms of its variety, speed, and latency. This fog-driven IoT architecture is followed by various case examples of services and applications that are implemented on those layers. Those examples range from mobile health, assisted living, e-medicine, implants, early warning systems, to population monitoring in smart cities. We then finally address the challenges of IoT eHealth such as data management, scalability, regulations, interoperability, device–network–human interfaces, security, and privacy

AN ATTEMPT TO DEFINE CONTEXT AWARENESS IN MOBILE E-HEALTH ENVIRONMENTS

Nurses, doctors, physiotherapists, psychologists and other professionals or specialists come together to provide care to home residing patients, making continuous assessment, diagnosis and treatment possible beyond the walls of hospitals. Such teams of professionals are focused on each individual patient, and are virtual, i.e. they make decisions without being together physically, dynamically, i.e. professionals come and go as needed, and collaborate, as they combine their knowledge to provide effective care. Our system, coined DITIS, is a web based system that enables the effective management and collaboration of virtual healthcare teams and accessing medical information in a secure manner from a variety of mobile devices from anytime and anyplace, adapting the information according to various parameters like, user role, access right, device capabilities and wireless medium. This paper introduces the DITIS system, and identifies the needs and challenges of co-ordinated teams of multidisciplinary healthcare professionals (HCPs) functioning in a context awareness environment under the wireless environment. Pilo

A User-Centred Approach to Reducing Sedentary Behaviour

The use of digital technologies in the administration of healthcare is growing at a rapid rate. However, such platforms are often expensive. As people are living longer, the strain placed on hospitals is increasing. It is evident that a usercentric approach is needed, which aims to prevent illness before a hospital visit is required. As such, with the levels of obesity rising, preventing this illness before such resources are required has the potential to save an enormous amount of time and money, whilst promoting a healthier lifestyle. New and novel approaches are needed, which are inexpensive and pervasive in nature. One such approach is to use human digital memories. This outlet provides visual lifelogs, composed of a variety of data, which can be used to identify periods of inactivity. This paper explores how the DigMem system is used to successfully recognise activity and create temporal memory boxes of human experiences, which can be used to monitor sedentary behaviour

Do we all really know what a fog node is? Current trends towards an open definition

Fog computing has emerged as a promising technology that can bring cloud applications closer to the physical IoT devices at the network edge. While it is widely known what cloud computing is, how data centers can build the cloud infrastructure and how applications can make use of this infrastructure, there is no common picture on what fog computing and particularly a fog node, as its main building block, really is. One of the first attempts to define a fog node was made by Cisco, qualifying a fog computing system as a “mini-cloud” located at the edge of the network and implemented through a variety of edge devices, interconnected by a variety, mostly wireless, communication technologies. Thus, a fog node would be the infrastructure implementing the said mini-cloud. Other proposals have their own definition of what a fog node is, usually in relation to a specific edge device, a specific use case or an application. In this paper, we first survey the state of the art in technologies for fog computing nodes, paying special attention to the contributions that analyze the role edge devices play in the fog node definition. We summarize and compare the concepts, lessons learned from their implementation, and end up showing how a conceptual framework is emerging towards a unifying fog node definition. We focus on core functionalities of a fog node as well as in the accompanying opportunities and challenges towards their practical realization in the near future.Postprint (author's final draft