Health Fog for Smart Healthcare

Internet of Things (IoT) and sensing have led to significant improvements in the delivery of healthcare. IoT can extend its scope by accessing cloud resources. Cloud, on the other hand, can also enhance its services from the data collected from healthcare IoTs. However, IoT and the cloud are generally physically distant from each other making it a challenge to provide services with specific requirements (such as fast response time, less compute-intensive processing). To address these requirements, we need some type of middleware technology such as a fog which resides between the cloud and IoT ecosystem. We describe how fog enables cloud-IoT convergence and can be deployed to achieve smart healthcare. We present a few use cases where the use of fog can improve healthcare delivery. Finally, we discuss relevant issues and opportunities that must be considered in the future in order to realize the smart healthcare vision.