Leveraging Fog Computing for a Secure and Smart Healthcare

Abstract

From hairbrushes to scales, all devices have sensors embedded in them to collect and communicate data. Smart Healthcare is proving to be an exciting and dynamic area with lots of room for new innovations and the increasing consumer demand for proactive health monitoring devices. Having India poised to spend a lot on healthcare, recent innovations using IoT devices and big data analytics can propel the healthcare industry into the future. Smart healthcare providers are leveraging cloud computing with fog computing to optimize their healthcare services. These smart healthcare applications depend mainly on the raw sensor data collected, aggregated, and analyzed by the smart sensors. Smart sensors these days generate myriad amount of data like text, image, audio, and video that require real-time or batch processing. Aggregating these diverse data from various types of resources remains a dispute till date. To resolve this issue, we have proposed a softwarized infrastructure that integrates cloud computing and fog computing, message brokers, and Tor for supple, safe, viable, and a concealed IoT exploitation for smart healthcare applications and services. Our proposed platform employs machine-to-machine (M2M) messaging, data fusion and decision fusion, and uses rule-based beacons for seamless data management. Our proposed flexBeacon system provides an IoT infrastructure that is nimble, secure, flexible, private, and reasonable. We have also proposed an M2M transceiver and microcontroller for flawless data incorporation of smart healthcare applications and services. Based on the IoT devices’ technical capabilities and resource availability, some systems are capable of making use of homomorphic encryption and zero knowledge proofs. The proposed flexBeacon platform offers seamless management and data aggregation without loss of accuracy. The cost of implementing a softwarized IoT for smart healthcare is also greatly reduced.