Context Sensitive Health Monitoring Using Fog Computing

摘要

Health informatics has become one of the most researched area when it comes to application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Wireless and wearable sensors have become prevalent devices to monitor patients at risk for chronic diseases. This helps ascertain that patients comply by the treatment plans and also safeguard them during sudden attacks. The amount of data that is gathered from various sensors are numerous. In this paper we propose to use fog computing to help monitor patients suffering from chronic diseases such that the data is collected and processed in an efficient manner. The main challenge would be to only sort out context sensitive data that is relevant to the health of the patient. Just having a simple sensor-to-cloud architecture is not viable and this is where having a fog computing layer makes a difference. This increases the efficiency of the entire system as it not only reduces the amount of data that is transported back and forth between the cloud and the sensors, but also eliminates the risk that a data center failure bears with it. We also analyse the security and deployment issues of this fog computing layer.