Ubiquitous healthcare: a systematic mapping study

Abstract

Ubiquitous healthcare is an emerging area that employs ubiquitous technologies to enable technology oriented environment for healthcare professionals for provision of efficient and effective healthcare services. In past years, research community has proposed various technological solutions in different healthcare areas such as chronic disease monitoring, gait analysis, mood and fall detection, neuropathic monitoring, physiological and vital signs monitoring, pulmonogical monitoring, etc. However, in-depth analysis of these proposed solutions is required to analyze the form of proposed ubiquitous healthcare solutions; the extent ubiquitous technologies are integrated in these solutions; the type of real problem addressed; and how far these solutions are evaluated in real world settings? The addressal of these questions is critical to understand and evaluate the progress made in the area of ubiquitous healthcare and identify the challenges that are hindering the progress in this area. Therefore, in this research, a systematic research technique in the form of mapping study (also known as scoping study) is employed for in-depth analysis of evidences available on ubiquitous healthcare. The mapping study adopts a systematic approach to construct chain of evidences related to a particular topic and is a well-defined research technique in evidence based software engineering. This study identified a total of 103 primary studies, published between 2007 and 2018, for analysis of area under investigation. The study findings reveal that research trend in ubiquitous healthcare is horizontally spread by involving broad range of healthcare areas. The proposed solutions largely fall under the category of validation studies where experiments are conducted in laboratory settings rather real world environment. Another interesting finding is the lack of involvement of relevant healthcare community in proposed solution design. The challenges such as context awareness, data ownership, privacy and security, usability and trust are limiting the adoption of proposed solutions. Therefore, more extensive studies are required to first evaluate the applicability of proposed solutions in their respective environment, second, engagement and ownership of relevant community in solution design need to be considered. Third, the broad coverage of healthcare areas does not provide significant clusters of similar research in any particular area therefore future research should focus on strengthening these areas by conducting evaluation based longitudinal studies. In this way, the effects of proposed solutions can only be measured objectively and can be added to the body of knowledge. Finally, this research provides a thorough insight into the research on ubiquitous healthcare and offers an opportunity to conduct further research in this area.