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. 2021;80(30):36361-36400.
doi: 10.1007/s11042-021-11227-x. Epub 2021 Sep 4.

Fog-based healthcare systems: A systematic review

Zahra Ahmadi  1 , Mostafa Haghi Kashani  1   2 , Mohammad Nikravan  2 , Ebrahim Mahdipour  1
Affiliations

Fog-based healthcare systems: A systematic review

Zahra Ahmadi et al. Multimed Tools Appl. 2021.

Abstract

The healthcare system aims to provide a reliable and organized solution to enhance the health of human society. Studying the history of patients can help physicians to consider patients' needs in healthcare system designing and offering service, which leads to an increase in patient satisfaction. Therefore, healthcare is becoming a growing contesting market. With this significant growth in healthcare systems, such challenges as huge data volume, response time, latency, and security vulnerability are raised. Therefore, fog computing, as a well-known distributed architecture, could help to solve such challenges. In fog computing architecture, processing components are placed between the end devices and cloud components, and they execute applications. This architecture is suitable for such applications as healthcare systems that need a real-time response and low latency. In this paper, a systematic review of available approaches in the field of fog-based healthcare systems is proposed; the challenges of its application in healthcare are explored, classified, and discussed. First, the fog computing approaches in healthcare are categorized into three main classes: communication, application, and resource/service. Then, they are discussed and compared based on their tools, evaluation methods, and evaluation metrics. Finally, based on observations, some open issues and challenges are highlighted for further studies in fog-based healthcare.

Keywords: Fog computing; Healthcare; Systematic review; eHealth.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The layered architecture of fog computing in healthcare applications
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Distribution of published paper based on publication
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Fig. 3
Distribution of papers over the years based on the publication
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Fig. 4
The classification of fog computing in the healthcare system
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Percentage of the presented fog computing approaches in healthcare systems
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Percentage of the presented popular tools and simulation environments in the literature
Fig. 7
Fig. 7
Percentage of metrics in the reviewed techniques of fog-based healthcare
Fig. 8
Fig. 8
Percentage of evaluation metrics in categorized papers
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Fig. 9
Percentage of the applied measurement environments in the literature
Fig. 10
Fig. 10
The open issues and challenges of some papers in the fog-based healthcare
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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