Digital health in smart cities: Rethinking the remote health monitoring architecture on combining edge, fog, and cloud

Purpose Smart cities that support the execution of health services are more and more in evidence today. Here, it is mainstream to use IoT-based vital sign data to serve a multi-tier architecture. The state-of-the-art proposes the combination of edge, fog, and cloud computing to support critical health applications efficiently. However, to the best of our knowledge, initiatives typically present the architectures, not bringing adaptation and execution optimizations to address health demands fully. Methods This article introduces the VitalSense model, which provides a hierarchical multi-tier remote health monitoring architecture in smart cities by combining edge, fog, and cloud computing. Results Although using a traditional composition, our contributions appear in handling each infrastructure level. We explore adaptive data compression and homomorphic encryption at the edge, a multi-tier notification mechanism, low latency health traceability with data sharding, a Serverless execution engine to support multiple fog layers, and an offloading mechanism based on service and person computing priorities. Conclusions This article details the rationale behind these topics, describing VitalSense use cases for disruptive healthcare services and preliminary insights regarding prototype evaluation.