1
Smart Health Care Development: Challenges and Solutions

R. Sujatha*, E.P. Ephzibah and S. Sree Dharinya

School of Information Technology & Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

Across the globe, every city dreams to become a smart city. Integration of information and communication technologies to optimize the lifestyle of people is the process involved in smart city. Each government thinks and takes various measures to fulfil the necessities of smart city. To achieve this vision statement of smartness in various fields, nations both in developed and developing countries find it a challenging task. The ultimate idea is infrastructure designed by introducing the electronic devices to provide easier access of data and ensuring higher level of communication that will provide a flawless environment. The various tasks include providing required water, electricity, education transportation, safety, good sanitation and health. Taking care of elderly people is a major concern in all the places. Traditional ways of handling files to track the patients' health have slowly entered the phase of digitization. In turn now so many electronic gadgets, sensors etc., are used to make this process so effective and efficient. Smart health care is experiencing the rapid growth with the invention of devices along with technologies like IoT, machine learning, big data, artificial intelligence and so on. Modern era devices for substantiating the smart health are the crux of this chapter.

Keywords: Wearable devices, IoT, machine learning, deep learning, monitoring, patient health care, artificial intelligence

1.1 Introduction

In developed countries, a smart city is already imbibed and in developing countries establishing a smart city is tough and a time-consuming task. Obviously initiation begins from the federal level. In the fast growing world, the need for smart health is very crucial. Particularly now, the nuclear family setup is growing in a steep phase and the growing population think about their own benefits that in turn increased the gap between the people. Electronic health record is the starting point in the health sector. Health is the great asset for well-being. Evolutionary and exponential change in the lifestyle is the great threat for the health of all living beings. The need for taking care of our living environment is at the alarming factor. Growth of industries and usage of higher level of computing and trending technology have reduced the mobility of the people to a lot. It is the public interest to take this issue as the priority and introduce the integrated health care monitoring aspect in the people's lives. At the outset, awareness to each individual needs to be nurtured.

The rest of the content discusses about the various aspects that substantiates the smart healthcare system and the way it is getting optimized in each phases by intervening the medical health care with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) [1]. The Internet became the integral part of life years before itself. As the time passed, the utilization of the same became indispensable in manner. Various fields like education, agriculture, marketing, manufacturing, finance, medical and list goes on started relying on the ICT to grow to the next level. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tag is used in the initial stages to track the information in the huge dataset maintenance. The best usage of RFID is found in the library management that helps to find in which location particular book available in huge library infrastructure, ensuring no one is taking the book out of the library without legitimate issue phase. The Herculean task of maintaining the library is made easier. Similarly in the healthcare system, tracking the condition of people is achieved. This marks a milestone in incorporating the Internet of Things (IoT) that is the linking of various devices across the globe. Various architecture evolved due to this process of putting together sensors, RFID tags, computer, expert system, database and so on to converse and provide valuable input based on the situation.

All these produce huge versatile data that need to be handled in perfect manner to gain the benefit of the system. Big data (BD) is the buzz word that made the field of information technology (IT) highly competitive in nature. Stored data needs to be analyzed to provide knowledge based on the requirement. Along with BD many captions like analyst, scientist, and engineering joined to make it very potential area both in job and research perspective [2]. Process of storing at economical manner paved way to cloud computing. Public, private and hybrid clouds evolved based on the capacity of the storage person and purpose [3]. Numerous algorithms, methods passed over the voluminous data that paved way to data mining and in turn branched various concepts like machine learning, soft computing, deep learning, image processing, artificial intelligence. All this depend much on the maths, statistics, business, technology and no doubt domain on which it's applied [4].

By incorporation of the said design the system that consists of input, processing and output that helps in decision making process. In the case of smart healthcare system diagnosis of the diseases by comparing, 'n' number of traits and its value. Based on the insights provided by the system, a suitable treatment provided to control the disease. The ultimate aim of smart healthcare is to ensure sustainable health condition and longevity of the life. By careful requirement gathering followed by analysis of the same, it is the success criteria that define the system.

1.2 ICT Explosion

From the 1990s, the ICT boomed. Later, e-health is the word coined from electronic based health care management which gained popularity by the exponential inventions in the ICT sector. Stakeholders of e-health are patients, physicians, clinicians, researchers and so on. ICT pillars are wireless and wired network, big data analytics, personal devices, sensors, 3d printers. ICT paradigms are mobile cloud, cloud computing, fog computing and IoT. ICT-based healthcare patterns are e-health, pervasive health, ubiquitous health, mobile health and personalized health. Various characteristics like ICT, mobile connectivity, internet, personal smart devices, ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing and context awareness paved the way to different ICT-based healthcare pattern [5-7].

Health data format used different acronyms in research papers like electronic medical record (EMR), electronic health record (EHR), electronic patient record (EPR), clinical data repository (CDR), patient medical record information (PMRI) and so on. Precisely all try to store a patient's personal and history about their visits and follow ups. Since all focus on storing data in a centralized manner, this makes it highly potential to know about status of patient in no time [8, 9]. Various devices utilized in the interactive manner from mobile devices is the boon in gaining efficient output at a low cost in developing countries and great impact is missing of data is minimized [10, 11]. Factors like age, sex, education, residence, living with partner, marital status and other technological factors like network bandwidth, devices capability make the system highly challenging in nature. There is a controversial discussion that adaptability of elderly people for ICT is quiet cumbersome and variation felt across the globe in distribution [12, 13]. Several research works carried on in the US, UK and other countries to know the pulse of elderly people acceptance for ICT. In comparison it seemed that people who were born a lot earlier found the advent of ICT in the health department inconvenient and uncomfortable. Usage of devices in itself is not easy for the elderly age group [14-17]. Easy user interface and extra care and concern to train the elderly people are required in the case of ICT-based healthcare system [18-20].

1.2.1 RFID

The health care industry is facing versatile issues due to the increase in population and types of diseases. The World Health Organization (WHO) has mentioned that medical errors are serious traits that need to be taken into consideration or else it will make the living environment so tough [21]. For this, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suggested incorporating IT so the great problem of misidentification could be handled [22]. Often the medical errors include misidentification of patients, wrong medical prescription and follow ups, and inappropriate in the blood transfusion [23, 24].

Patient identification, tracking, monitoring and drug compliance are the phases involved in RFID usage. To ensure perfect treatment given to correct patient is the primary requirement of any healthcare system. Smart RFID makes the system of identifying patient task flawless in nature. Procedures like initial appointment till any surgery in case of casualty will be happening smoothly when tagged properly with RFID. Works are based on the principle of radio frequency [25, 26]. Tracking patient based on emergency is the benefit of the RFID system. Continuity of the treatment is maintained and long waiting time during discharge is waived because of this integration process. A patient is under surveillance such that any crisis is addressed immediately [27, 28]. Implantable RFID helps to monitor and smart bandages used post-surgery aids a lot in...