Fog Computing in Healthcare
Subrata Datta, Priyanka Datta · 2024
Advancements in science and technology have commenced the era of the Internet of Things (IoT). Service-related activities with the IoT generate a large volume of heterogeneous data. Storing and processing a high volume of data using traditional techniques increases production costs. Therefore, fog computing (FC) paradigm has been introduced to mitigate the production costs. This fact makes fog computing an emerging area of research in recent time. Technically, FC functions as an initial computing paradigm in the domain of cloud computing (CC). The fog computing paradigm covers a wide variety of applications in different sectors such as transportation, navigation, and agriculture. Among the several applications of fog computing, healthcare is the most promising. Rapid global population growth has created new challenges for healthcare services. In this respect, traditional healthcare services suffer from scarcity of doctors and medical equipment. This also increases the cost of treatment. To eliminate this, the fog computing paradigm has been applied in healthcare services such as diagnosis and monitoring. Fog computing provides real-time remote solutions to medical problems or services at a low cost. This has boosted the healthcare industry. Recently, there has been an era of Healthcare 4.0, which demands smooth, secure, and accurate healthcare services. Traditional FC-based healthcare systems suffer from several problems in the context of data processing, data transmission, data security and authenticity, and power consumption. Several researchers have contributed different proposals to uplift FC-based healthcare services. This paper presents a systematic literature review on FC-based healthcare from 2019 to 2023 to highlight the recent and pioneering contributions of researchers. The review first proposes an application taxonomy for fog computing in the healthcare sector. Second, it identifies critical challenges in the implementation of FC-based healthcare services. Finally, this study draws a limelight on the opportunities in FC-based healthcare services for future research.