IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May/June 2023 - 63

monitoring purpose.Wefirst discuss various phases related to development of anewfogbased
private blockchain-enabledhomemonitoring framework. Next,wediscusshow
artificial intelligence-enabled big dataanalytics helps in analyzing and tracking the
patients' information related toCOVID-19 cases. Finally, a blockchain implementationhas
been performedto exhibit practicaldemonstration of the proposed blockchain system.
& TO TRACK A patient in a home monitoring
system, specifically during the coronavirus disease-2019
(COVID-19) pandemic, the Internet of
Medical Things (IoMT) plays a very important
role.1-3 In IoMT environment, a person's body is
deployed with variouswearable/implantable smart
devices, which communicate with the nearby
mobile device(s) owned by that person. The information
collected by the mobile device is then
stored in the cloud server (CSs).
Fog computing is a distributed computing
application consisting of a number of servers that
can perform computation and networking, and
provide storage similar to the servers in a cloud
data center. Fog computing essentially aims to
bring server resources closer to the devices
involved in the generation of data. It increases the
intelligence of local area network by allowing computation
of the data to be performed using the
resource capabilities available inside the network
where the data gathering devices exist. This helps
to reduce latency in response times that are encountered
in cloud computing where the data was
needed to be transmitted to servers placed in different
geographical locations before any processing
could begin. Fog computing has also allowed
increased security of data by allowing highly sensitive
data to be processed at fog servers and only
low-sensitivedatato beforwarded to the CS. It
also promotes better management of huge volumes
of data by distributing the data amongmultiple
nodes in the local network.
Fog computing can be used in conjunction with
cloud computing and edge computing. Cloud computing
consists of multiple high-resource servers
placed inside a data center owned by a service provider.
Any user needing resources will associate
with the provider and pay for the amount of resource
used, without the need for delving into the
details of managing these resources. On the other
hand, fog computing allows the processing to be
performed at the local network of the data gathering
device, whereas edge computing allows the
processing to be performed at either the devices
that hold the sensors or a gateway node placed in
close physical proximity to these sensor devices.
Internet of Things (IoT) is a collection of highly
diverse devices with the ability to read the physical
parameters of their surroundings, process the
data in a distributed manner, and perform collective
actions based on the processed data, using
the Internet and withminimal human intervention.
Fog computing has major applications in the IoT
world, where a huge amount of data sensed by the
IoT smart sensor devices are regularly sent to the
CSs for processing. The working of IoT is highly
reliant on real-time processing of sensor data as
the user is in continuous interaction with the smart
devices. In such a scenario, latency due to processing
and network transmissionmay be highly deterrent
to the smooth functioning of many IoT
applications. In addition, data in IoT applications
are sensitive to the user and requires protection
from any unprecedentedmisuses. This shows that
fog computing is supremely relevant in the context
of IoT applications.
The distributed nature of IoT and fog computing
mandates that the security provided to the
resources of networking anddata on these applications
is also based on a distributed structure. The
nodes in a fog computing environment should be
working with equal capacities without any necessity
of trust among them, in order to allow the
layers and infrastructure that constitute the stack
of a fog node to be owned and managed by different
entities. This idea of security necessitates the
need for distributed trust in fog computing that
can be realized using the concept of blockchain
technology. Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized
system that stores any data in a ledger in
the form of transactions inside a block and connects
multiple such blocks together as a chain.
The distributed nature of a blockchain is in the replication
of the blockchain among the nodes in a
network using mining strategies and the collective
maintenance of the blockchain for consistency in
May/June 2023
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IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May/June 2023

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