Role of Dew Computing in Smart Healthcare Applications

The Internet of Things can provide promising solutions for quick, reliable, and smart healthcare services to patients and health workers. Such smart healthcare devices generate a large chunk of data continuously at a very rapid rate. These healthcare data are required to be processed and action needs to be taken to save lives in real time. However, the traditional IoT-based healthcare architectures use the remote cloud as the processing and analysing unit which increases the response time and decreases the reliability of the service. To address this problem, researchers have provided several solutions such as Edge, Fog, and Dew computing to improve the reliability and service time. Dew computing enables the IoT architectures to provide important services even in offline conditions with ultra-low latency. In this paper, a detailed analysis of Dew computing, its use-cases in healthcare, its advantages and limitations, and different service architectures are presented in detail. A comparison with other IoT computing architectures is also discussed with different parameters. The survey also presents the state-of-the-art in this domain indicating various research issues in dew computing while used in healthcare applications. Finally, different future research directions are also pointed out.