Collaborative Learning of Different Types of Healthcare Data From Heterogeneous IoT Devices

In the realm of healthcare data analysis, privacy concerns have been tackled by the federated learning (FL) framework. However, in the situation that heterogeneous healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) devices collect different types of data, applying FL becomes difficult. To train a model leveraging diverse healthcare IoT devices, we propose an advanced collaborative learning framework to fill the gap. With the proposed collaborative learning framework, individual IoT devices project their sensed features into a carefully developed latent space, which are transmitted to a central server. For privacy preservation, the latent local features are encoded within this space, while the samples’ labels remain securely stored in the individual IoT devices. Collaboratively, the deep neural network model is trained by both the central server and the diverse IoT devices. The central server handles the computationally intensive training processes, while the individual IoT devices evaluate the model’s performance and initiate back-propagation based on their locally stored labels. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed collaborative learning framework achieves performance similar to centralized training and significantly outperforms individual training while preserving data privacy.