Health Fog: a novel framework for health and wellness applications

In the past few years the role of e-health applications has taken a remarkable lead in terms of services and features inviting millions of people with higher motivation and confidence to achieve a healthier lifestyle. Induction of smart gadgetries, people lifestyle equipped with wearables, and development of IoT has revitalized the feature scale of these applications. The landscape of health applications encountering big data need to be replotted on cloud instead of solely relying on limited storage and computational resources of handheld devices. With this transformation, the outcome from certain health applications is significant where precise, user-centric, and personalized recommendations mimic like a personal care-giver round the clock. To maximize the services spectrum from these applications over cloud, certain challenges like data privacy and communication cost need serious attention. Following the existing trend together with an ambition to promote and assist users with healthy lifestyle we propose a framework of Health Fog where Fog computing is used as an intermediary layer between the cloud and end users. The design feature of Health Fog successfully reduces the extra communication cost that is usually found high in similar systems. For enhanced and flexible control of data privacy and security, we also introduce the cloud access security broker (CASB) as an integral component of Health Fog where certain polices can be implemented accordingly. The modular framework design of Health Fog is capable of engaging data from multiple resources together with adequate level of security and privacy using existing cryptographic primitives.