Towards a Comprehensive Data Analytics Framework for Smart Healthcare Services

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.