Leveraging IoT and Fog Computing in Healthcare Systems

Internet of things (IoT) is playing a pivotal role in bringing comfort and ease in human lives by connecting billions of devices across the globe. Innovation and development in IoT have established new ways to analyze patient data in healthcare systems. Currently, IoT and cloud-based solutions are available to process and analyze patient data, but cloud computing causes large end-to-end delay and network usage problems while processing huge amounts of data. Efficiency and security are still a challenge in IoT-based healthcare systems. Fog computing is introduced to overcome the issues of cloud computing by providing computing and storage services at the edge of the network. In this article, first we present a fog based efficient architecture for IoT-based healthcare systems. Then we present the user authentication method through identity management to prevent security breaches. The fog based architecture for healthcare includes the idea of a virtual machine (VM) partitioning in fog node to smoothly run the body sensor network and medical IoT devices data. The Elliptic Curve Cryptography technique is used to generate the output token for the user authentication method.