TILAA: Tactile Internet-based Ambient Assistant Living in fog environment

Ambient assisted living provides an environment to aid regular activities (such as exercise, medical diagnosis etc.) for well being of users. In this direction, posture correcting mechanisms can be developed to have a real-time detection and correction system, which allow doctors and caregivers to monitor the patients' health without worrying about potential falls and backaches. Most of the data related to patient health resides on the cloud environment to be accessed from anywhere by different users. However, the existing cloud computing infrastructure does not support a quick feedback for posture correction by the patients located geographically separated locations. However, with the advent of 5G networks, a new networking paradigm of Tactile Internet emerges having low latency communication for ubiquitously connecting heterogeneous devices at the edge of the network. Keeping focus on these issues, we propose, TILAA, a framework for Tactile Internet-based Ambient Assistance Living in fog environment in this paper. It provides a collaborative communication feedback to the patients and doctors with reduced delay. TILAA consists of a micro controller, sensing devices such as-accelerometer and gyroscopes, and a battery holder. The straps on the chest wearable consist of actuators, which send vibrations as a Tactile feedback to the doctors or to the hospitals for taking proactive measures in case of emergency. Performance evaluation of TILAA shows that it has superior performance for the back posture of all patients as compared to pre-existing expensive detection and posture schemes. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.