Fog computing for Healthcare 4.0 environment: Opportunities and challenges

Internet of things provides interaction with billions of objects across the world using the Internet. In Internet of thing era, Healthcare Industry has grown-up from 1.0 to 4.0 generation. Healthcare 3.0 was hospital centric, where patients of long-lasting sickness suffered a lot due to multiple hospital visits for their routine checkups. This in turn, prolonged the treatment of such patients along with an increase in the overall expenditure on treatment of patients. However, with recent technological advancements such as fog and cloud computing, these problems are mitigated with a minimum capital investment on computing and storage facilities related to the data of the patients. Motivated from these facts, this paper provide an analysis of the role of fog computing, cloud computing, and Internet of things to provide uninterrupted context-aware services to the end users as and when required. We propose a three layer patient-driven Healthcare architecture for real-time data collection, processing and transmission. It gives insights to the end users for the applicability of fog devices and gateways in Healthcare 4.0 environment for current and future applications. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.