Researchers advance secure remote health monitoring for elderly care

The health care sector is increasingly turning to innovative solutions to meet the needs of an aging population. A new framework based on Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) computing promises to revolutionize health care for older people by enabling real-time, remote monitoring of health metrics while addressing concerns surrounding data privacy and security.

Writing in the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, Hafida Saidi and Nabila Labraoui of the University of Abou Bekr Belkaid in Chetouane Tlemcen, Algeria, and Ado Adamou Abba Ari of the University Paris-Saclay in Versailles, France, explain that health care for seniors has conventionally involved direct visits to or from health care providers.

Regular checkups, tests, and diagnoses have usually been done face-to-face. However, with a growing number of older people with a range of health problems, this model is becoming unsustainable. Innovations such as the medical equivalent of the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) could change all that.

Smart medical devices, sensors, and health applications connected through the internet offer the possibility of remote monitoring. This would allow physicians and other health care providers to track their patients’ conditions remotely, as well as potentially prescribing and administering treatments.

While this technology has the potential to reduce clinic and hospital visits and improve access to health care overall, it comes with significant challenges around the safeguarding of sensitive medical data.

The new framework addresses these concerns by combining the strengths of cloud and fog computing. Fog computing, which places computational power closer to the source of data (such as at the patient’s home or nearby health care facilities), reduces the amount of data that needs to be transmitted to distant cloud servers. This allows for faster processing times and reduces the strain on networks, which is crucial for real-time applications like health monitoring.

The proposed Fog-to-Cloud computing builds on this idea by enhancing storage capabilities, minimizing network traffic, and lowering latency, that are safe from hackers, data breaches, and inadvertent access by third parties within health care.