Challenges and Issues of E-Health Applications in Cloud and Fog Computing Environment

Smart health care is the recent buzzword in the healthcare environment. Involvement of technology in the healthcare domain provides a platform for remote real-time monitoring and self-management of patients' health. The cloud computing is much utilized for developing technological solutions for an efficient smart healthcare system. Since cloud is a centralized environment, its response time becomes an issue in supporting latency-sensitive obligation in real-time applications. Most solutions in the e-health field depend on immediate decision making over real-time data where latency cannot be tolerated. Fog computing is a distributed infrastructure that overcomes this weakness of cloud computing by having the facility of local storage and processing in providing immediate response for decision making. Hence, thereby, it reduces the network latency and bandwidth usage by decreasing the amount of data sent to the cloud. This combination of fog computing and cloud computing can able to employ a reliable and efficient distributed e-health applications. This paper presents a literature review on the common use of cloud computing and fog computing for providing solutions in health care, along with the challenges that exist in providing solutions through fog computing.