Fog-Enabled IoT Framework for Heart Disease Diagnosis Systems

IoT technology has been recently adopted in healthcare systems to quickly detect abnormalities from patients, diagnose diseases and provide supports in time, even remotely. In the field of heart disease, timely diagnosis and prediction help to save people. This paper proposes a fog-based IoT approach to collect and analyze electrocardiogram (ECG) signals from patients to detect abnormalities or heart attacks with a short response time so that appropriate treatments can be provided. Commonly, ECG signals are transmitted to an eco-expert system deployed on the cloud to perform preliminary automatic diagnosis using a knowledge base built from medical experts. Although such an eco-expert system assists patients and supports physicians in performing treatment for their patients, there are several open technical challenges. First, noise in raw ECG signals makes the data imprecise and reduces the prediction accuracy. Second, involving data mining and machine learning on the cloud poses a significant latency since a huge amount of data needs to be transferred in the network. This paper proposes a novel framework that can provide the integrity of the ECG data by removing noise and then extract relevant knowledge for heart disease diagnosis at the network edge based on data mining techniques. Practical experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework not only guarantees the integrity of the data but also enhances the accuracy of the real-time detection compared with previous works.