EdgeCare: Leveraging Edge Computing for Collaborative Data Management in Mobile Healthcare Systems

With the wide application of mobile healthcare systems, the total amount of healthcare data is ever increasing rapidly as users interact with healthcare service providers frequently. This leads to a challenging task to manage healthcare data. Existing work mainly pay attention to centralized and blockchain-based mechanisms. But they cannot adapt to the increasing amount of global healthcare data and suffer from complex application challenges, respectively. Decentralized and collaborative data management assisted by edge computing exhibits major advantages in improving overall system performance. We present a secure and efficient data management system named as EdgeCare for mobile healthcare systems. Local authorities are established to schedule edge servers for processing healthcare data and facilitating data trading. A hierarchical architecture with collaboration is designed for feasible implementation of EdgeCare. After that, we investigate secure data uploading and sharing in the system. We use an electronic medical record to show how healthcare data is processed with security considerations. We also conduct the Stackelberg game-based optimization algorithm to approach the optimal incentive mechanism for a data collector and users in the fair decentralized data trading. The numerical results with security analysis are provided to demonstrate that EdgeCare offers effective solutions to protect healthcare data, and support efficient data trading.