FIT A Fog Computing Device for Speech TeleTreatments

TL;DR

This paper introduces FIT, a low-power fog computing device designed to process clinical speech data from Parkinson's patients locally, enabling secure and efficient remote speech analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel fog computing interface (FIT) that processes clinical speech data locally, reducing reliance on cloud processing and enhancing privacy for remote patient monitoring.

Findings

Validated a working prototype with speech data from six Parkinson's patients.

Demonstrated effective extraction of clinical speech features locally.

Showed FIT's capability to replace cloud-based processing with fog-based analysis.

Abstract

There is an increasing demand for smart fogcomputing gateways as the size of cloud data is growing. This paper presents a Fog computing interface (FIT) for processing clinical speech data. FIT builds upon our previous work on EchoWear, a wearable technology that validated the use of smartwatches for collecting clinical speech data from patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). The fog interface is a low-power embedded system that acts as a smart interface between the smartwatch and the cloud. It collects, stores, and processes the speech data before sending speech features to secure cloud storage. We developed and validated a working prototype of FIT that enabled remote processing of clinical speech data to get speech clinical features such as loudness, short-time energy, zero-crossing rate, and spectral centroid. We used speech data from six patients with PD in their homes for validating FIT. Our results showed the efficacy of FIT as a Fog interface to translate the clinical speech processing chain (CLIP) from a cloud-based backend to a fog-based smart gateway.