Developing an e-health system based on IoT, fog and cloud computing

The world population's life expectancy has gradually increased. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the life expectation will reach 90 years by 2030, and this quality of life is one of most important aging aspects. The academic and business communities are devoting many efforts to develop new applications that promote quality of life for this portion of the population; services, such as vital signs monitoring, fall detection systems, heart attacks, among others, are increasingly in evidence. Most of these e-health systems are focused on intelligent devices - Internet of Things (IoT). However, IoT by itself is not able to process, store and guarantee the quality of service of these services due to hardware capacity limitations. So, to mitigate this issue, IoT has two major allies in order to be able to provide e-health services with high availability and quality, fog and cloud computing. This paper presents in progress e-health architecture using IoT for data acquisition, fog for data pre-processing and short-term storage, and cloud for data processing, analyze and long-term storage. We also describe main challenges to provide an e-health application with high availability, high performance and accessibility, at low deployment and maintenance cost.