Fed xData: A Federated Learning Framework for Enabling Contextual Health Monitoring in a Cloud-Edge Network

Due to the rapid recent development of cloud-edge networks, smart devices can facilitate rapid access to patients’ health information. Success has been achieved in the healthcare sector with the training of a federated learning (FL) model on large amounts of the personal data of users. However, some challenges remain that other FL models have not yet addressed. Firstly, FL models with computational parameters are very complex, which results in a high communication cost in the cloud-edge network. Furthermore, trained models in the cloud are not personalized. If personalization is present, the models do not provide practical solutions to fine-tune parameters in order to accurately predict performance in health monitoring. To address the above challenges, this paper presents the Fed xData framework for contextual health monitoring in cloud-edge networks. The Fed xData framework introduces a continuous data balancing supplemented structure using the RandomOverSample method, which solves all data classes. The FL model is an encode depth convolutional network (EDCN) model designed for both server and client. It solves various problems, for instance by using the fine-tuning model to increase personalization and solving not independent and identically (Non-IID) distribution problems regarding user health. Test results based on human activity recognition indicate that Fed xData is far superior to others for use in general centralized learning models and FL models.