智慧医疗——从物联网到云计算

Abstract

Information technology is a key to solve Chinas growing demand for satisfactory medical services. Smart healthcare, which is an integration of various information technologies including Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and big data processing, aims at building a remote disease prevention and care platform. There are three core components in smart healthcare: data acquisition, knowledge discovery, and remote service. ‘Data acquisition’ is the process of monitoring vital signs using various medical sensors and uploading the data to a medical datacenter via wireless networks. Though data acquisition is based on mature technologies of IoT, great care must be taken in continuously collecting vital signs data which has many requirements such as high precision, low latency, and being available anytime and anywhere. ‘Knowledge discovery’ applies statistics, machine learning, visualization, and data mining on medical data to find out key physiological characteristics, to predict health risks, and to detect diseases early. However, the big medical data poses great challenges to the efficiency and the scalability of such data analysis. ‘Remote service’ offers remote treatment and care solutions to patients, or data analysis results and treatment recommendations to doctors. Undoubtedly, we are facing many challenges in providing these services requiring timely and accurate responses. In this paper, we discuss the above issues in smart healthcare and propose potential solutions.