A Framework for Cleaning Streaming Data in Healthcare: A Context and User-Supported Approach

Abstract

Nowadays, ubiquitous technology makes life easier, especially devices that use the internet (IoT). IoT devices have been used to generate data in various domains, including healthcare, industry, and education. However, there are often problems with this generated data such as missing values, duplication, and data errors, which can significantly affect data analysis results and lead to inaccurate decision making. Enhancing the quality of real-time data streams has become a challenging task as it is crucial for better decisions. In this paper, we propose a framework to improve the quality of a real-time data stream by considering different aspects, including context-awareness. The proposed framework tackles several issues in the data stream, including duplicated data, missing values, and outliers to improve data quality. The proposed framework also provides recommendations on appropriate data cleaning techniques to the user to help improve data quality in real time. Also, the data quality assessment is included in the proposed framework to provide insight to the user about the data stream quality for better decisions. We present a prototype to examine the concept of the proposed framework. We use a dataset that is collected in healthcare and process these data using a case study. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is verified by the ability to detect and repair stream data quality issues in selected context and to provide a recommended context and data cleaning techniques to the expert for better decision making in providing healthcare advice to the patient. We evaluate our proposed framework by comparing the proposed framework against previous works.