ABSTRACT
The Internet of Things helps people to communicate with billions of objects all over the globe. The healthcare industry has progressed from Generation 1.0 to Generation 4.0 in the Internet of Things. Patients with long-term conditions struggled tremendously because of frequent hospital visits for regular check-ups in Healthcare 3.0. The prolonged treatment of patients increased the overall expenditure too. These issues are mitigated by modern technical developments such as fog and cloud computing, which provide a minimal capital cost in computing and storage facilities relating to patient records. The generation of data by the IoT devices is very large. Cloud computing is the current method for dealing with this data. However, according to the data center specifications, IoT data processing will become infeasible due to the huge distance between these IoT smart devices and the data centers. IoT data processing requires less delay. The transit time among the data center and end devices can influence the data’s importance. To overcome these problems, a new network model dubbed “fog computing” is being deployed near end devices like sensors. Fog computing, if deployed correctly, will increase the quality of service (QoS) provided to applications that require the analysis of time-sensitive data, like health systems that could benefit from the rapid data processing by detectors to allow patient monitoring. In this chapter, the characteristics and general architecture of fog computing is discussed, along with a comparison to the existing cloud computing technology. The chapter discusses the integration of fog computing in medical IoT along with the benefits of fog computing in healthcare. It gives the detailed information about the services related to healthcare in the fog layer. A framework of IoT with fog computing in the healthcare domain is proposed. The chapter concludes with the various research challenges and the case study in this domain.
