The future of computing paradigms for medical and emergency applications

Healthcare is of particular importance in everyone’s life, and keeping the advancement of it on a good pace is a priority of any country, as it highly influences the overall well-being of its citizens. Each government strives to build a modern, intelligent medical system that provides maximum population coverage with high-quality medical services. The development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) significantly improves the accessibility and effectiveness of the healthcare system by forming the eHealth environment, thus, providing an opportunity to enhance the quality of patient care and significantly speed up the work of medical experts and reduce costs for medical services. Shifting medical services to digital and remote operations requires a lot of computational capabilities. Implementing new computing paradigms is prominent — remote services face new requirements due to the increasing data and demand for new computing solutions. Computing paradigms, e.g., Cloud, Edge, Mobile Edge Computing, besides others, are used to process the collected medical data, improving patient healthcare quality. This paper focuses on computing solutions for medical use cases by offering a comprehensive survey on standardization aspects, use cases, applicable computing paradigms, security limitations, and design considerations within the ICT usages for medical applications. Finally, it outlines the most critical integration challenges and solutions from the literature.