Privacy-preserving Federated Fog Distributed Database in Healthcare
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32350/icr.52.05Keywords:
Distributed databases, federated learning, fog computing, healthcare, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)Abstract
The digital transformation of healthcare has increased the demand for analytical frameworks that can securely process the data. These frameworks address the rapidly growing volumes of medical data generated across interconnected hospitals and Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) ecosystems. Recent progress in distributed and privacy-preserving learning has reduced dependence on centralized storage of data. Most existing approaches are centralized in terms of model optimization. They pay little attention to underlying distributed data management issues in multi-institution healthcare environments. However, limited coordination between distributed healthcare data repositories often leads towards inconsistency, reduced reliability, and scalability. The final result negatively affects the reliability and scalability of collaborative healthcare analytics. In an effort to close this structural gap, the current study proposed the Federated Distributed Database System (FedDDBS). It is a coordinately designed hierarchical architecture consisting of robust database coordination as well as federated intelligence. The proposed approach enables healthcare institutions to perform local model training on protected medical data. It also ensures continuity and security of distributed data storage. Moreover, it deploys a pipeline of validation stages with multi-stage verification. Afterwards, it combines these verified updates. Experimental results proved that integrating the concepts of the DDBMS and Federated Learning (FL) enhanced data integrity and strengthened communication security. It also stabilized the model convergence without violating strict privacy provisions. In general, FedDDBS offers a scalable, high-assurance system for healthcare analytics. It delivers trustworthy intelligence within various medical facilities under the condition of adherence to privacy-preserving standards.
Downloads
References
[1] G. Yang et al., “Federated learning as a catalyst for digital healthcare innovations,” Patterns, vol. 5, no. 7, art. no. e101026, Jul. 2024, https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2024.101026.
[2] M. Shafiq, J.-G. Choi, O. Cheikhrouhou, and H. Hamam, “Advances in IoMT for healthcare systems,” Sensors, vol. 24, no. 1, art. no. e10, Jan. 2024, https://doi.org/ 10.3390/s24010010.
[3] M. Nasajpour et al., “Federated learning in smart healthcare: A survey of applications, challenges, and future directions,” Electronics, vol. 14, no. 9, art. no. e1750, May 2025, https:// doi.org/10.3390/electronics14091750.
[4] R. Eden et al., “A scoping review of the governance of federated learning in healthcare,” npj Digit. Med., vol. 8, no. 1, art. no. e427, Jul. 2025, https:// doi.org/10.1038/s41746-025-01836-3.
[5] S. Pati et al., “Privacy preservation for federated learning in health care,” Patterns, vol. 5, no. 7, art. no. e100974, Jul. 2024, https://doi.org/10.1016 /j.patter.2024.100974.
[6] M. Butt, N. Tariq, M. Ashraf, H. S. Alsagri, S. A. Moqurrab, H. A. A. Alhakbani, and Y. A. Alduraywish, “A fog-based privacy-preserving federated learning system for smart healthcare applications,” Electronics, vol. 12, no. 19, art. no. e4074, Oct. 2023, https://doi.org/10.3390/ electronics12194074.
[7] T. U. Islam, R. Ghasemi, and N. Mohammed, "Privacy-preserving federated learning model for healthcare data," in Proc. 2022 IEEE 12th Annu. Comput. Commun. Workshop Conf. (CCWC), Las Vegas, NV, USA, Jan. 26–29, 2022.
[8] S. Ghosh and S. K. Ghosh, “FEEL: Federated Learning framework for Elderly healthcare using Edge-IoMT,” IEEE Trans. Comput. Social Syst., vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 1800–1809, Aug. 2023, https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2022.3233300.
[9] B. Almogadwy and A. Alqarafi, “Fused federated learning framework for secure and decentralized patient monitoring in Healthcare 5.0 using IoMT,” Sci. Rep., vol. 15, no. 1, art. no. 24263, Jul. 2025, https://doi.org/10. 1038/s41598-025-06574-w.
[10] R. Haripriya, N. Khare, M. Pandey, and S. Biswas, “A privacy-enhanced framework for collaborative big data analysis in healthcare using adaptive federated learning aggregation,” J. Big Data, vol. 12, no. 1, art. no. 113, May 2025, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40537-025-01169-8.
[11] H. Malik, A. Naeem, R. A. Naqvi, and W.-K. Loh, “DMFL_Net: A federated learning-based framework for the classification of COVID-19 from multiple chest diseases using X-rays,” Sensors, vol. 23, no. 2, art. no. e743, Jan. 2023, https://doi.org/10.3390 /s23020743.
[12] F. Alruwaili, S. P. Mohanty, and E. Kougianos, "FedSecure: A robust federated learning framework for adaptive anomaly detection and poisoning attack mitigation in IoMT," in Proc. 1st IEEE Conf. Secure Trustworthy CyberInfrastructure IoT Microelectron. (SaTC), Fairborn, OH, USA, Feb. 25–27, 2025, https://doi. org/10.1109/SATC65530.2025.11137301.
[13] N. Nezhadsistani, N. S. Moayedian, and B. Stiller, “Blockchain-enabled federated learning in healthcare: Survey and state of the art,” IEEE Access, vol. 13, pp. 119922–119945, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1109/ ACCESS.2025.3587345.
[14] Z. Ngoupayou Limbepe, K. Gai, and J. Yu, “Blockchain-based privacy-enhancing federated learning in smart healthcare: A survey,” Blockchains, vol. 3, no. 1, art. no. 1, Jan. 2025, https://doi.org/10.3390/blockchains3010001.
[15] T. Li, A. K. Sahu, A. Talwalkar, and V. Smith, “Federated learning: Challenges, methods, and future directions,” IEEE Signal Process. Mag., vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 50–60, May 2020, https://doi.org/10.1109/MSP. 2020.2975749.
[16] H. B. McMahan, E. Moore, D. Ramage, S. Hampson, and B. Agüera y Arcas, “Communication-efficient learning of deep networks from decentralized data,” in Proc. 20th Int. Conf. Artif. Intell. Statist. (AISTATS), vol. 54, 2017, pp. 1273–1282.
[17] M. Abadi et al., “Deep learning with differential privacy,” in Proc. 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conf. Comput. Commun. Secur. (CCS), Vienna, Austria, 2016, pp. 308–318, https://doi.org/10.1145/2976749.2978318.
[18] T. Ohtani, R. Yamamoto, and S. Ohzahata, “IDAC: Federated learning-based intrusion detection using autonomously extracted anomalies in IoT,” Sensors, vol. 24, no. 10, art. no. 3218, May 2024, https://doi.org/ 10.3390/s24103218.
[19] S. J. Reddi et al., "Adaptive federated optimization," in Proc. 9th Int. Conf. Learn. Represent. (ICLR), Virtual Conf., May 3–7, 2021.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Seemab Firdous

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.