Elsevier

Big Data Research

Volume 4, June 2016, Pages 44-58
Big Data Research

Towards a Comprehensive Data Analytics Framework for Smart Healthcare Services

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bdr.2016.05.002Get rights and content

Abstract

With the increasing volumes of information gathered via patient monitoring systems, physicians have been put on increasing pressure for making sophisticated analytical decisions that exploit the various types of data that is being gathered per patient. This phenomenon of continuously growing datasets is arising and gaining momentum in several application domains to what is now recognized in the business community as the Big Data challenge. In this article, we define and discuss some of the major challenges in the healthcare systems which can be effectively tackled by the recent advancement in ICT technologies. In particular, we focus on sensing technologies, cloud of computing, internet-of-things and big data analytics systems as emerging technologies which are made possible by the remarkable progress in various aspects including network communication speed, computational capabilities and data storage capacities that provide various advantages and characteristics that can contribute towards improving the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare services. In addition, we describe the architectural components of our proposed framework, SmartHealth, for big data analytics services and describe its various applications in the healthcare domain.

Introduction

In the last decade, we have been witnessing a continuous increase in lifestyle-related illnesses as a result of various factors such lack of exercise, poor diet, pollution and the addictive habit of smoking. For example, a recent study has estimated that 9% of deaths across the world in 2008 were caused by physical inactivity and merely improving the physical activity levels can affect the life expectancy of the world's population by an increase of 0.68 years [23]. In addition, current guidelines for a healthy life are recommending that adults should spend about 150 minutes of their week on physical activity. However, the study reported that 1/3 of adults are not performing sufficient physical activity which leads to increasing risk of the adults developing certain diseases such as heart-related diseases and diabetes. Our diets have also profoundly differed in the last decades. For example, the consumption of fast food and processed food has been rising continuously across the world resulting in the growing intake of salt, fat, simple sugars and sweeteners [41]. In addition, there has been major increases in the consumption of meat and a corresponding reduction in the consumption of vegetables, whole-grain foods and non-citrus fruits. All of such updates together lead to major increases in the number of calories being consumed, increasing the obesity levels and resulting in severe health threats. Therefore, diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer and diabetes have become the major cause of death across the world.

In general, the medical advancements, improved handling of communicable diseases, and better diet have increased peoples's life expectancy. For example, some reports estimated that life expectancy has increase by 13 years during the course of the 21st century.1 The UN expects that, life expectancy is going to increase from 68 years in 2005–2010 to 81 years in 2095–2100.2 Therefore, global aging and its associated effect on the performance of health services are acknowledged as an increasing phenomenon over the last decades. Many countries have been affected by the challenge of an aging population where older individuals represent a bigger share of the size of their population. In particular, the number of people with an age of 65 years old or older is expected to increase from an estimation of 524 million in 2010 to about 1.5 billion in 2050 [13]. Such demographic changes are consequently leading to rising demands for healthcare services and higher government expenditures because it is commonly expected that elder individual are naturally more vulnerable to health problems and chronic diseases. Such increasing expenses on healthcare services represent a crucial challenge for almost every government.

In principle, the economics of healthcare systems is getting a lot of attention because of the current dynamics of global demographics. In particular, the spending on healthcare services is commonly a high priority of the internal political agenda and discussions in almost all countries. It is expected that the healthcare costs will account for 20–30% of GDP in some countries by 2050 [17], [21], a percentage that is financially unsustainable. In principle, costs continue to increase leading to a consequent need to change the focus of the approaches of healthcare services from that of a reactive model to a model that utilizes predictive healthcare mechanisms. Governments consider smarter healthcare as an effective way of improving quality while minimizing service cost. Establishing such models requires monitoring and diagnosing various data sources for the sake of being able to achieve accurate and effective predictions. Additionally, applications for providing the support of delivering in-home exercise programs for improving the balance and strength of older adults can serve as a preventative action for health problems such as falls. Other applications include activity monitoring, fitness measurements via important signs for monitoring and calorie-intake tracking where various product offerings overlap with main public health advices on activity, exercise, managing one's diet, and observing for early indications of health-related problems. Such indications will be significantly amplified as governments suffer from increasing healthcare expenses in the long run, increasing the opportunities for incorporating sensing-based healthcare platforms and solution.

In principle, the above challenges confirm that the current reactive models of healthcare systems have become unsustainable. Therefore, there have been increasing calls for various major changes in the mechanisms of providing the healthcare services. For example, the healthcare services need to be predictive and proactive to limit the occurrence of expensive acute health episodes [37]. In addition, the healthcare services need to be individualized, rather than population-based in order to guarantee the delivery of the right treatment. Furthermore, the delivery process of care services need to be decentralized from hospitals to the community and the home. In practice, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can play a main role in achieving all of these goals and can represent an effective solution to deliver manageable models of patient services in home and community locations. For example, sensing technology [41] can play a main role on monitoring the main health status indicators of an individual directly or indirectly via ambient monitoring of day-to-day patterns where in-house healthcare has become a main component of the Internet-of-Things (IOT) [30]. In addition, wearable sensing technology [49] is designed to monitor an individual's vital signs at all times, i.e 24/7, where alerts can be communicated to a medical staff/caregiver in the case that a certain limit is reached or in the case an abnormal event such as the collapse of a patient gets observed. Big data analytics services [57] can monitor and detect vital signs and other various measurements which can be provided to physicians or healthcare providers to support them in the diagnosis process. In addition, this diagnosis can be even automated so that it can minimize or remove the need to visit the physician for simple illnesses such as flu and other more common illnesses.

This article focuses on analyzing how the recent advancements of ICT can be effectively exploited and integrated for tackling the above mentioned challenges and contribute towards the state-of-the-art of healthcare services. In particular, we focus on exploiting the advancement in the areas of sensor technologies, cloud computing, Internet-Of-Things and big data analytics systems as emerging technologies, which are made possible by the remarkable progress in various complementary advancements including network communication speed, computational capabilities and data storage capacities that provide various advantages and characteristics that can contribute towards improving the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare services.

The main contribution of this paper is two-fold; Firstly, analyzing the state-of-the-art in the aforementioned key enabling areas and technologies, and identifying the challenges and gaps for the realization of an integrated and comprehensive smart healthcare data analytics solution. Secondly, drawing on the findings of this analytical study, we propose an integrated and comprehensive framework for big data analytics services in smart healthcare networks, SmartHealth, which addresses the revealed challenges and fills in the identified gaps. The Framework acts as a roadmap for the research in the area of big data analytics in smart healthcare applications.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: the analytical study starts in Section 2 by presenting and analyzing related work and open challenges in the area of smart healthcare systems, which reveals a set of enabling technologies towards the realization of an integrated and comprehensive data analytics smart healthcare solution. We then dedicated separate Sections to discuss and analyze each of these enabling technologies. In particular, sensing technologies is explicated in Section 3, cloud computing and its application to the domain of healthcare is discussed in Section 4. This is followed by a discussion about Big Data storage and processing systems in Section 5. Based on this comprehensive analytical study, an integrated and comprehensive framework for big data analytics in healthcare is derived in Section 6, which represents the second main contribution of this paper. Sample application scenarios and use cases of the proposed framework is presented in Section 7. The paper is then concluded in Section 8, highlighting future work directions.

Section snippets

Related work and open challenges

The term Cyber Physical System represents the umbrella term that integrates and exploits recent ICT advancement in sensing computing, cloud computing, Internet-Of-Things, and big data storage and analytics, with numerous applications in various domains, such as healthcare, manufacturing, traffic, logistics, etc. A cyber-physical system (CPS) is a system of collaborating computational elements controlling physical entities [58]. It is a new revolution in sensing, computing and communication that

Sensing technologies

Sensing is a pervasively used technology in nearly every aspect of hospital-based service starting from the simplest digital thermometer to complex laser-guided surgical tools [41]. For example, imaging sensing technologies (e.g., magnetic, X-ray), positron emission tomography (PET), computed tomography (CT) and ultrasound are commonly used technologies for providing the medical staff with several insights into the health status of every patient. These sensors have played a crucial role in

Cloud computing

Cloud computing has been acknowledged on the top of Gartner's list of the ten most disruptive technologies of the next years [1]. It represents a paradigm shift in the field of ICT which has been already emerging to change the ways of how businesses deal with their storage and computing resources [18]. In principle, cloud computing represents an emerging paradigm for the process of provisioning computing resources and infrastructure. This paradigm shifts the location of the computing resources

Big data storage and processing systems

In general, using the mining metaphor, data represent the new gold where analytics systems represent the machinery that mines, molds and mints it. In practice, healthcare systems across the world are facing the challenge of information overload in caring for patients. Healthcare analytics is defined as a set of computer-based methods, processes and workflows for transforming raw health data into meaningful insights, new discovery and knowledge that helps in making more effective healthcare

SmartHealth framework

In general, due to recent advancements in sensor devices and other related technologies, the cost of data acquisition has reduced dramatically. In principle, while the initial setup costs are relatively high, the continuous data acquisition remains very cheap. In addition, these initial costs are continuously going down with the continuous advancements in sensor technologies. In practice, sensing-based patient monitoring generates much more data than healthcare professionals are able to

Use cases and application scenarios

In general, the volume of healthcare data is expected to continue growing dramatically in the years ahead. In practice, utilizing the recent advancements on ICT to effectively analyze and utilize such big data can bring about significant benefits for healthcare organizations ranging from single-physician offices and multi-provider groups to large hospital networks in several use cases and application scenarios. In particular, healthcare analytics can be leveraged in several applications with

Conclusion and future work

In this article, we analyzed how the recent advancements of ICT can be effectively exploited and integrated for tackling the above mentioned challenges and contribute towards the state-of-the-art of healthcare services. In particular, we focused on exploiting the advancements in the areas of sensor technologies, cloud computing, Internet-Of-Things and Big data analytics systems as emerging technologies that can significantly contribute towards improving the efficiency and effectiveness of

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