FEEL: FEderated LEarning Framework for ELderly Healthcare Using Edge-IoMT

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT technology have revolutionized the healthcare industry by providing effective remote healthcare. Furthermore, with the aging of the world’s population, remote health monitoring and recommendations are becoming imperative to provide cost-effective healthcare solutions for improving the quality of life of our senior citizens. The explosive growth of wearable sensors (IoT sensors) and health bands has facilitated the interconnection among patients and caregivers to enable assisted living by leveraging AI techniques. This work proposes an end-to-end connected smart home healthcare system (FEEL) for elderly people. Our proposed framework addresses the main challenges of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) system namely, the scarcity of labeled data and user’s diverse needs. The major contributions of the work are: 1) few-shot learning-enabled novel federated learning (FL) framework for health data and context information analysis and recommendation; 2) user and context-based knowledge graph (UKG) to represent and model health parameters and environmental impacts on recommendations; 3) deep learning architecture for activity monitoring and location estimation of the users; and 4) edge-fog-IoMT collaborative framework to collect, store, and share medical recommendations while protecting the privacy of the users. FEEL is specifically beneficial for elderly homes where several aged people stay together and require constant care. We aim to develop a novel AI module where along with the health parameters, the social context of the home can be augmented to provide an accurate and improved healthcare service. FEEL has been evaluated for three tasks, namely: 1) activity monitoring and location estimation; 2) fall detection; and 3) medical recommendations for unusual health conditions. A customized wearable device has been used to collect, store, and send health-related parameters. The experimental evaluation demonstrates promising accuracy (F1 score 0. 86–0. 94 range) for the tasks and outperforms the baselines by a significant margin (10 %–16%).