FAAL: Fog computing-based patient monitoring system for ambient assisted living

From the last few years, Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have attracted a lot of attention from both academia and industry due to an increase in real-time data capturing and processing for patient monitoring. This has become possible due to the technological advancements in which high computing and communication facilities are available for most of the modern handheld devices. In this environment, computing resources are available close to the proximity of the end users using the most popular technology called as Fog computing (devices used in the fog computing are called as fog devices). Most of the solutions reported in the literature for this purpose have used the traditional cloud-based infrastructure in which there may occur a long delay for getting the response even for data which is not of very huge amount which may cause a performance degradation for most of the implemented solutions (such as for treatment of neurological diseases where a real-time monitoring is required) in this environment. Hence, to cope up these issues, in this paper, we proposed a fog computing based patient monitoring system for ambient assisted living (FAAL). Data traces of the movement of the patients (for neurological diseases) are collected using sensor nodes using body area networks (BANs) and are passed using the fog gateways. To reduce the load on the communication infrastructure, an efficient clustering algorithm for data transmission is also presented in the paper. Performance of the proposed solution has been evaluated using the parameters such as-latency, and data overloading. Results obtained clearly show the superior performance of the proposed scheme as compared to the non-fog computing based environment.