The Interoperability of Fog and IoT in Healthcare Domain: Architecture, Application, and Challenges

The great technological advances and rapid growth in the physical objects being connected to the Internet have led to the emergence of the term “Internet of Things” (IoT). IoT has an impact on almost all areas like construction, business, data analytics, e-commerce, agriculture, transportation, and healthcare. Maintenance of such a system can be done by the cloud computing but due to issues like long processing times, slow responses, and privacy issues, it is not preferred in real-time systems. IoT with its integration with fog computing can resolve problems like slow responses, delays, privacy, and security issues in healthcare systems. This chapter discusses the IoT and fog computing, their architecture, their application domains, and their integration and importance in healthcare. A literature survey involving all the works that include fog and IoT is discussed. Case studies involving fog and IoT in healthcare systems are also presented to provide light on how fog and IoT eliminate pressures on healthcare systems that require real-time processing.