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Fog computing in health: A systematic literature review

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Abstract

Currently, technology greatly benefits the area of healthcare. Modern computers can quickly process a large volume of patient health records. Due to recent advances in the area of Internet of Things and healthcare, patient data can be dispersed in multiple locations. As a result, scientists have been proposing solutions based on Cloud Computing to manage healthcare data. However, suchs solutions present challenges regarding access latency, context-awareness, and large volumes of data. There is an increased probability of processing and transmission errors are more likely to occur as health data sets become larger and more complex. In this context, Fog Computing presents itself as an alternative to reduce health data management complexity, consequently increasing its reliability. To that end, it is important to comprehend the associated challenges before defining a Fog Computing-based architecture to manage healthcare data. This article presents a systematic literature review of fog computing being applied to healthcare area. We propose a taxonomy to explore the open issues and most important challenges on these fields of study. We selected 1070 scientific articles published in the last 10 years, filtering the 44 most significant works for an in-depth analysis. We found that there is several challenges to be addressed such as interoperability, privacy, security, data processing, management of resources and Big Data issues. Also, our contribution include developing a taxonomy for the Fog Computing and healthcare fields of study and finding out challenges and open questions of this area.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES (Finance Code 001), a foundation for higher education personnel improvement linked to the Brazilian Ministry of Education; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico - CNPq (Grant Numbers 303640 / 2017-0 and 405354 / 2016-9), which is a National Council of Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications created for Scientific and Technological Development and encourage research in Brazil for supporting this work, and Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia (IFRS), a public Brazilian institution that offer vocational and technological education, in all their levels and modalities for funding parts of this study.

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  1. Software Innovation Laboratory - SOFTWARELAB, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos - UNISINOS, Av. Unisinos, 950 93022-750, São Leopoldo, RS, Brazil

    Humberto Jorge de Moura Costa, Cristiano André da Costa, Rodrigo da Rosa Righi & Rodolfo Stoffel Antunes

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  1. Humberto Jorge de Moura Costa
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de Moura Costa, H.J., da Costa, C.A., da Rosa Righi, R. et al. Fog computing in health: A systematic literature review. Health Technol. 10, 1025–1044 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12553-020-00431-8

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