FAST: A fog computing assisted distributed analytics system to monitor fall for stroke mitigation

Fog computing is a recently proposed computing paradigm that extends Cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. The new features offered by fog computing (e.g., distributed analytics and edge intelligence), if successfully applied for pervasive health monitoring applications, has great potential to accelerate the discovery of early predictors and novel biomarkers to support smart care decision making in a connected health scenarios. While promising, how to design and develop real-word fog computing-based pervasive health monitoring system is still an open question. As a first step to answer this question, in this paper, we employ pervasive fall detection for stroke mitigation as a case in study. There are four major contributions in this paper: (1) to investigate and develop a set of new fall detection algorithms, including new fall detection algorithms based on acceleration magnitude values and non-linear time series analysis techniques, as well as new filtering techniques to facilitate fall detection process; (2) to design and employ a real-time fall detection system employing fog computing paradigm, which distribute the analytics throughout the network by splitting the detection task between the edge devices (e.g., smartphones attached to the user) and the server (e.g., servers in the cloud); (3) we carefully exam the special needs and constraints of stroke patients and propose patient-centered design that is minimal intrusive to patients. This type of patient-centered design is currently lacking in most of the existing work; and (4) our experiments with real-word data show that our proposed system achieves the high sensitivity (low missing rate) while it also achieves the high specificity (low false alarm rate). At the same time, the response time and energy consumption of our system are close to the minimum of the existing approaches.