Enhancing IoT Healthcare with Federated Learning and Variational Autoencoder

The growth of IoT healthcare is aimed at providing efficient services to patients by utilizing data from local hospitals. However, privacy concerns can impede data sharing among third parties. Federated learning offers a solution by enabling the training of neural networks while maintaining the privacy of the data. To integrate federated learning into IoT healthcare, hospitals must be part of the network to jointly train a global central model on the server. Local hospitals can train the global model using their patient datasets and send the trained localized models to the server. These localized models are then aggregated to enhance the global model training process. The aggregation of local models dramatically influences the performance of global training, mainly due to the heterogeneous nature of patient data. Existing solutions to address this issue are iterative, slow, and susceptible to convergence. We propose two novel approaches that form groups efficiently and assign the aggregation weightage considering essential parameters vital for global training. Specifically, our method utilizes an autoencoder to extract features and learn the divergence between the latent representations of patient data to form groups, facilitating more efficient handling of heterogeneity. Additionally, we propose another novel aggregation process that utilizes several factors, including extracted features of patient data, to maximize performance further. Our proposed approaches for group formation and aggregation weighting outperform existing conventional methods. Notably, significant results are obtained, one of which shows that our proposed method achieves 20.8% higher accuracy and 7% lower loss reduction compared to the conventional methods.