Secure Fog Computing for Remote Health Monitoring with Data Prioritisation and AI-Based Anomaly Detection

Abstract

Smart remote health monitoring requires time-critical medical data of patients from IoT-enabled cyber-physical systems (CPSs) to be securely transmitted and analysed in real time for early interventions and personalised patient care. Existing cloud architectures are insufficient for smart health systems due to their inherent issues with latency, bandwidth, and privacy. Fog architectures using data storage closer to edge devices introduce challenges in data management, security, and privacy for effective monitoring of a patient’s sensitive and critical health data. These gaps found in the literature form the main research focus of this study. As an initial modest step to advance research further, we propose an innovative fog-based framework which is the first of its kind to integrate secure communication with intelligent data prioritisation (IDP) integrated into an AI-based enhanced Random Forest anomaly and threat detection model. Our experimental study to validate our model involves a simulated smart healthcare scenario with synthesised health data streams from distributed wearable devices. Features such as heart rate, SpO2, and breathing rate are dynamically prioritised using AI strategies and rule-based thresholds so that urgent health anomalies are transmitted securely in real time to support clinicians and medical experts for personalised early interventions. We establish a successful proof-of-concept implementation of our framework by achieving high predictive performance measures with an initial high score of 93.5% accuracy, 90.8% precision, 88.7% recall, and 89.7% F1-score.