Informatica

Healthcare has seen many advances in sensor technology, but with recent improvements in networks and the addition of the Internet of Things, it is even more promising. Current solutions to managing healthcare data with cloud computing may be unreliable at the most critical moments. High response latency, large volumes of data, and security are the main issues of this approach. The promising solution is fog computing, which offers an immediate response resistant to disconnections and ways to process big data using real-time analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). However, fog computing has not yet matured and there are still many challenges. This article presents for a computer scientist a systematic review of the literature on fog computing in healthcare. Articles published in six years are analysed from the service, software, hardware, information technologies and mobility with autonomy perspectives. The contribution of this study includes an analysis of recent trends, focus areas and benefits of the use of AI techniques in fog computing e-health applications.

Blockchain is gaining traction for improving the security of healthcare applications, however, it does not become a silver bullet as various security threats are observed in blockchain-based applications. Moreover, when performing the security risk management (SRM) of blockchain-based applications, there are conceptual ambiguities and semantic gaps that hinder from treating the security threats effectively. To address these issues, we present a blockchain-based healthcare security ontology (HealthOnt) that offers coherent and formal information models to treat security threats of traditional and blockchain-based applications. We evaluate the ontology by performing the SRM of a back-pain patient’s healthcare application case. The results show that HealthOnt can support the iterative process of SRM and can be continually updated when new security threats, vulnerabilities, or countermeasures emerge. In addition, the HealthOnt may assist in the modelling and analysis of real-world situations while addressing important security concerns from the perspective of stakeholders. This work can help blockchain developers, practitioners, and other associated stakeholders to develop secure blockchain-based healthcare applications in the early stages.