Rebirth of Distributed AI—A Review of eHealth Research

The envisioned smart city domains are expected to rely heavily on artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) approaches for their operations, where the basic ingredient is data. Privacy of the data and training time have been major roadblocks to achieving the specific goals of each application domain. Policy makers, the research community, and the industrial sector have been putting their efforts into addressing these issues. Federated learning, with its distributed and local training approach, stands out as a potential solution to these challenges. In this article, we discuss the potential interplay of different technologies and AI for achieving the required features of future smart city services. Having discussed a few use-cases for future eHealth, we list design goals and technical requirements of the enabling technologies. The paper confines its focus on federated learning. After providing the tutorial on federated learning, we analyze the Federated Learning research literature. We also highlight the challenges. A solution sketch and high-level research directions may be instrumental in addressing the challenges.