oHealth: Opportunistic Healthcare in Public Transit through Fog and Edge Computing

Access to healthcare services is one of the fundamental pillars of society today. People either have access to healthcare or they are not privileged enough to visit a doctor. In underprivileged societies, access to healthcare is difficult due to various reasons such as fewer number of doctors and healthcare facilities, inefficient communication means, and so on. This may result in exaggeration of the disease or threat to life. On the other hand, those who are privileged, end up paying unnecessary visits to the physician in most of the cases on an average (>71% in USA), and incurring high costs. Often-times, health issues are minor, and it is not necessary to visit a doctor. In such a case, the patient only requires suggestions on quick health fix, or some precautionary measures. Such information can be provided through the combination of a smartphone-based app, fog/edge computing, and mobile communication. Hence, reaching out to the doctors in their available time (off-time, commuting via public transit, so on) when they can answer some quick questions is one of the solutions that fit into smart healthcare definition, and truly pervasive healthcare. In this paper, we propose an innovative healthcare service architecture, called opportunistic healthcare (oHealth), where health log and questions can be opportunistically offloaded to a nearby (such as at public transit) compute entity (such as fog server) capable of processing health logs (up to 234,729 logs daily as per our setup). The fog node communicates the questions to a doctor, who provides the necessary feedback. We provide proof-of-concept evaluation results (in WiFi vs 4G networks, on the basis of delay, cost, and commute time, comparing cloud with fog) to endorse the applicability of our oHealth.