Healthcare Architecture Research Articles

Cloud-based Healthcare data management Framework

Cloud computing services changed the way the data are managed across the healthcare system that can improve patient care. Currently, most healthcare organizations are using cloud-based applications and related services to deliver better healthcare facilities. But architecting a cloud-based healthcare system needs deep knowledge about the working nature of these services and the requirements of the healthcare environment. The success is based on the usage of appropriate cloud services in the architecture to manage the data flow across the healthcare system.Cloud service providers offer a wide variety of services to ingest, store and process healthcare data securely. The top three public cloud providers- Amazon, Google, and Microsoft offers advanced cloud services for the solution that the healthcare industry is looking for. This article proposes a framework that can effectively utilize cloud services to handle the data flow among the various stages of the healthcare infrastructure. The useful cloud services for ingesting, storing and analyzing the healthcare data for the proposed framework, from the top three cloud providers are listed in this work. Finally, a cloud-based healthcare architecture using Amazon Cloud Services is constructed for reference.

FOG Assisted Healthcare Architecture for Pre-Operative Support to Reduce Latency

Technologies are affecting our day to day life, future trends, Warcraft, space explorations, Gene technologies and hybrid species but most importantly life expectancy has increased with the help of technological support in the medical field, with advancements in technologies. Few of the recent additions are the 5G, Tactile Internet, Internet of Things (IoT), AI and robotics, Technologies that have assisted inter-disciplinary advancements, resulting in efficient smart healthcare support systems; and has achieved a status of foremost socio-economic concern for expenditure incurring on healthcare issues and accessibility of resources. In an effective way, the inclusion of technology in healthcare makes it positively possible for professionals to monitor and attend chronic disease patients to provide timely treatment to the patients even in remote locations. Tele-surgery has a perspective to provide urgent medical services and came out with different opportunities to deliver highly skilled doctors globally. Tele-surgery requires technologies such as 5G, Tactile Internet and AI to help reduce problems of resource scheduling. This paper presents a technological analysis of robotic telesurgery which is based on 5G, Tactile Internet as well as on Artificial Intelligence (AI). This paper also discusses challenges and issues being encountered in telesurgery; subsequently, a FOG assisted interactive model is presented to expedite and reduce the latency of the process.

Global Hospitals in 2050—A review of the historical development of hospital building studies from a global perspective

AbstractThis paper aims to discuss the problems in the field of architectural planning and design and possible solutions to these problems by studying hospital buildings that have been developing in the latter half of the 20th century to meet the changing needs of healthcare provision for the super aging society in these days. The methodology used in this study involves reviewing the historical development of hospital building studies from a global perspective. This is followed by an explanation of the need underlying the search for a healing environment through the author's study of hospital ward planning for over 30 years. This study analyzed the author's personal global experience and engaged with an exchange of ideas emanating from discussions with several colleagues and friends in the field of healthcare from all over the world. The key focus of this study is the Global University Programs in Healthcare Architecture (GUPHA). This study discusses potential global perspectives on hospital architectural planning and design that will manifest in 2050. It aims at breaking the lack of access to Japanese researches on hospital architectural planning and design, since most such researches were published in Japanese and were thus inaccessible to the English‐speaking world.

Pathways, practices and architectures: Containing antimicrobial resistance in the cystic fibrosis clinic.

Antimicrobial resistance and the adaptation of microbial life to antibiotics are recognised as a major healthcare challenge. Whereas most social science engagement with antimicrobial resistance has focussed on aspects of 'behaviour' (prescribing, antibiotic usage, patient 'compliance', etc.), this article instead explores antimicrobial resistance in the context of building design and healthcare architecture, focussing on the layout, design and ritual practices of three cystic fibrosis outpatient clinics. Cystic fibrosis is a life-threatening multi-system genetic condition, often characterised by frequent respiratory infections and antibiotic treatment. Preventing antimicrobial resistance and cross-infection in cystic fibrosis increasingly depends on the spatiotemporal isolation of both people and pathogens. Our research aims to bring to the fore the role of the built environment exploring how containment and segregation are varyingly performed in interaction with material design, focussing on three core themes. These include, first, aspects of flow, movement and the spatiotemporal choreography of cystic fibrosis care. Second, the management of waiting and the materiality of the waiting room is a recurrent concern in our fieldwork. Finally, we take up the question of air, the intangibility of airborne risks and their material mitigation in the cystic fibrosis clinic.

SDN‐based wireless body area network routing algorithm for healthcare architecture

The use of wireless body area networks (WBANs) in healthcare applications has made it convenient to monitor both health personnel and patient status continuously in real time through wearable wireless sensor nodes. However, the heterogeneous and complex network structure of WBANs has some disadvantages in terms of control and management. The software‐defined network (SDN) approach is a promising technology that defines a new design and management approach for network communications. In order to create more flexible and dynamic network structures in WBANs, this study uses the SDN approach. For this, a WBAN architecture based on the SDN approach with a new energy‐aware routing algorithm for healthcare architecture is proposed. To develop a more flexible architecture, a controller that manages all HUBs is designed. The proposed architecture is modeled using the Riverbed Modeler software for performance analysis. The simulation results show that the SDN‐based structure meets the service quality requirements and shows superior performance in terms of energy consumption, throughput, successful transmission rate, and delay parameters according to the traditional routing approach.

The Creative Healthcare Architect.

The objectives of the research described in this article focus on an understanding of factors that influence creativity in healthcare design. Two areas of emphasis include the personality strengths of successful healthcare architects and elements of the current project delivery process. As part of the research, 48 healthcare architects participated in a battery of personality and creativity tests including Myers/Briggs, The Big Five, the Remote Associates Test (RAT), and an architectural creativity test. Results of the test point to strong "openness" for new ideas, particularly with the designers sampled. As a group, respondents scored low in "narcistic" bias (indicating emotional stability) and did not score high in verbal creativity. Compared to earlier studies of creative architects, the sample group included significantly fewer "perceiver" (Myers/Briggs), associated with a high level of curiosity. A second interesting finding was a significant difference between younger and older architects in the architectural creativity test. One possible hypothesis is the experience of the older architects. A second, and potentially more alarming, hypothesis is that technological disruptions are interfering with the ability to stimulate divergent thinking, particularly in the younger generation raised with smart phones and other network tools. Creativity in healthcare architecture demonstrates the case for domain-specific experience and skills along with creative input from other knowledge domains. The ability to establish group creativity may be inhibited by pressures to condense project time lines and not fully implement lean and other process strategies for exploring alternative solutions. Effective participation in group creativity tasks is particularly important for the complex world of healthcare design.

Survey on Architecture of Healthcare based Big Data

Healthcare industry is the one which constantly undergoes the changes with respect to medical dimensions. Healthcare industry involves very huge data which is a raw data so it is very difficult to analyze the raw data and produce proper result. As this task is very critical because these days medical field is using advance technologies like IoT and other computer related tools for finding particular disease of the patient. That generates very huge result so it is very important for patient as well as doctors to find the particular disease from the raw data. In this paper, a survey is made on different architecture of Healthcare based Big data. Also the tools and technologies used in each architecture. The framework of big data analytics for healthcare industry which mainly contains how it gathers the data from different places such as from different branch, from IoT, from electronic devices.

Exploiting Offloading in IoT-Based Microfog: Experiments with Face Recognition and Fall Detection

The growth in many countries of the population in need of healthcare and with reduced mobility in many countries shows the demand for the development of assistive technologies to cater for this public, especially when they require home treatment after being discharged from the hospital. To this end, interactive applications on mobile devices are often integrated into intelligent environments. Such environments usually have limited resources, which are not capable of processing great volumes of data and can expend much energy due to devices being in communication to a cloud. Some approaches have tried to minimize these problems by using fog microdatacenter networks to provide high computational capabilities. However, full outsourcing of the data analysis to a microfog can generate a reduced level of accuracy and adaptability. In this work, we propose a healthcare system that uses data offloading to increase performance in an IoT-based microfog, providing resources and improving health monitoring. The main challenge of the proposed system is to provide high data processing with low latency in an environment with limited resources. Therefore, the main contribution of this work is to design an offloading algorithm to ensure resource provision in a microfog and synchronize the complexity of data processing through a healthcare environment architecture. We validated and evaluated the system using two interactive applications of individualized monitoring: (1) recognition of people using images and (2) fall detection using the combination of sensors (accelerometer and gyroscope) on a smartwatch and smartphone. Our system improves by 54% and 15% on the processing time of the user recognition and Fall Decision applications, respectively. In addition, it showed promising results, notably (a) high accuracy in identifying individuals, as well as detecting their mobility; and (b) efficiency when implemented in devices with scarce resources.

E-Oral Health and Teledentistry in Finland - an Overview

Despite universal health coverage and a strong public health system, the oral health profile of Finland falls behind in an international age-matched prevalence of oral diseases. The oral healthcare system is organised and funded mainly by municipalities. Other stakeholders include the Finnish Student Health Service foundation (FSHS), government and private practices, where the Social Insurance Institution of Finland plays a major role in funding. Rise in the treatment need in recent years due to the increasing dentulous ageing population has challenged the healthcare system. Governmental response to the demand is an ongoing social and healthcare reform and increase of oral health professional education since 2004. However, the current and future treatment need is not met only by conventional prevention strategies and physical service provision. Finland has over the years supported a determined policy of building a digital healthcare architecture. This applies also to all fields of oral healthcare: virtual education, digital diagnostics, digital clinical workflow, national electronic patient records, patient-generated data registers, electronic prescriptions, remote consultation, digital service management, as well as research and big data mining. These tools could play an important role in improving national oral health and increasing equity. This is an overview of the above-mentioned fields of e-Oral health and teledentistry in Finland based on current scientific literature, national reports, strategies and legislation.
 
 

Toward an efficient healthcare CloudIoT architecture by using a game theory approach

The increasing adoption of the Internet of things and cloud computing in recent years provided the increasing development and improvement of various well-known approaches, such as the ambient assisted living approach. The merging of Internet of things and cloud brought about the so-called CloudIoT paradigm. CloudIoT intends to extend both technologies to make possible developing the next generation of smart environments, such as healthcare applications. New healthcare applications demand an increasing capacity of resources for storing, processing, and transmitting data. Looking at this scenario, along with the growing number of devices connected to the Internet of things, we must consider providing mechanisms to mitigate the excessive data offloading on the network, the latency between nodes, and even the unnecessary waste of computing power. In this article, we present an efficient and effective CloudIoT-based healthcare architecture for ambient assisted living environments. The innovation of our approach lies on the use of a game theory approach (by means of a stochastic search algorithm) to improve efficiency and latency of the CloudIoT network. This proposal aims to provide better availability levels to the whole environment. Experiments performed through simulation have shown us a remarkable improvement of network parameters, by applying a stochastic search algorithm called Gur game, when compared to a baseline application.

Biophilia and Salutogenesis as restorative design approaches in healthcare architecture

ABSTRACTThis study demonstrates the needs for developing the design of our hospitals to play a tangible role in the restoration of their patients. The investigative review of research literature highlighted there is a growing movement towards creating these restorative environments by reconnecting humans to nature. Which is based on extended research and analysis of the reasons behind the failure of today’s industrialized hospitals and the potential of turning back to nature by adopting Restorative environmental design (RED) principles to benefit both building users and the surrounding environment. How to implement this approach in the design of ‘restorative’ hospitals is however still uncertain. By using the mixed methodology of literature review and case study, this article offers a new design framework to utilize the therapeutic impact of the connection with nature to alleviate people’s distress, depression, anxiety and pain, by combining the principles of salutogenic and biophilic design. The applicability of the framework is tested in analysing the design of the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. The result demonstrates that the framework appears to be theoretically useful in introducing biophilic design to the design community; however, more empirical and practical assessment is needed to examine the impact of biophilic patterns.

A new healthcare architecture using IoV technology for continuous health monitoring system

Technology development has improved to its extent for mobile monitoring that mainly concentrates on a new trend that named as the Internet of Vehicles (IoV).A large number of researchers and organizations are attracted by this technological development that promises to be huge commercial interest. Several health monitoring devices were developed for the purpose of humans to identify themselves about their health problems and state of the situation about their health. This paper proposes a new architecture design for the healthcare that mainly concentrates on heart diseases using the IoV technology. Here, the continuous health monitoring device is used to monitor heart-related diseases that connected with IoV for obtaining a new way to provide and gather information about their health condition and updated automatically to the IoV based ambulance and the reports are updated to doctors using the same IoV technique. The architecture explains the several protocols that were used for communication, managing and analysis of data and transmitting from vehicle to device.

PUBLIC POLICY SESSION 2: ARCHITECTURE & HEALING: RAISING THE BAR ON RESIDENT-CENTERED, LONG TERM CARE FACILITY DESIGN: Session 207

Collaboration between subject matter experts in the field of geriatric medicine and healthcare architecture is crucial for our future in caring for the U.S. aging society. Using the Evidence Based Design (EBD) approach, this presentation will address the importance of providing homelike, residential environments for the care of the elderly and those with dementia in addition to implementing new technology to improve the quality of elderly care.

UAV-enabled healthcare architecture: Issues and challenges

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have great potential to revolutionize the future of automotive, energy, and healthcare sectors by working as wireless relays to improve connectivity with ground networks. They are able to collect and process real-time information by connecting existing network infrastructures including Internet of Medical Things (e.g., Body Area Networks (BANs)) and Internet of Vehicles with clouds or remote servers. In this article, we advocate and promote the notion of employing UAVs as data collectors. To demonstrate practicality of the idea, we propose a UAV-based architecture to communicate with BANs in a reliable and power-efficient manner. The proposed architecture adopts the concept of wakeup-radio based communication between a UAV and multiple BANs. We analyze the performance of the proposed protocol in terms of throughput and delay by allocating different priorities to the hubs or gateways. The proposed architecture may be useful in remote or disaster areas, where BANs have poor or no access to conventional wireless communication infrastructure, and may even assist vehicular networks by monitoring driver’s physiological conditions through BANs. We further highlight open research issues and challenges that are important for developing efficient protocols for UAV-based data collection in smart healthcare systems.

Fog computing for Healthcare 4.0 environment: Opportunities and challenges

Internet of things provides interaction with billions of objects across the world using the Internet. In Internet of thing era, Healthcare Industry has grown-up from 1.0 to 4.0 generation. Healthcare 3.0 was hospital centric, where patients of long-lasting sickness suffered a lot due to multiple hospital visits for their routine checkups. This in turn, prolonged the treatment of such patients along with an increase in the overall expenditure on treatment of patients. However, with recent technological advancements such as fog and cloud computing, these problems are mitigated with a minimum capital investment on computing and storage facilities related to the data of the patients. Motivated from these facts, this paper provide an analysis of the role of fog computing, cloud computing, and Internet of things to provide uninterrupted context-aware services to the end users as and when required. We propose a three layer patient-driven Healthcare architecture for real-time data collection, processing and transmission. It gives insights to the end users for the applicability of fog devices and gateways in Healthcare 4.0 environment for current and future applications.

An energy efficient fog-cloud based architecture for healthcare

Healthcare plays an important role in the growth of the country. Today, it is necessary to look after the healthcare sector. There are various technologies like Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics, which are working, in the healthcare sector to improve it. Some countries already adopt the cloud-based technologies to improve the healthcare system. The main problem with this cloud-based system is the high delay while store and processing the data. Due to high delay, the patients with the critical condition do not get the response or treatment timely. This may affect the patient will move to the dead state or the doctor will not able to take the right decision. To reduce the delay and response time nobody has proposed the Architecture. Due to heavy workload on cloud data centres, the energy consumption will also be increased. To overcome all these problems an architecture is necessary. In this paper, we are proposing an architecture named as Fog-Cloud based architecture. This architecture will reduce the delay, energy consumption, and the latency. To testbed, we execute one topology or scenario multiple times. The collected results show that our proposal is reducing the delay, energy consumption, and the latency in comparison to cloud only.

Super-resolution of retinal images using multi-kernel SVR for IoT healthcare applications

Internet of Things (IoT) healthcare is one of the most popular areas of research due to the rapid development in information and communication technologies. IoT system focusing on human vision would be an ideal solution for the people in developing countries to have adequate medical attention. This paper proposes a hybrid architecture for IoT healthcare to process the retinal images captured using smartphone fundoscopy. The proposed super-resolution (SR) algorithm for retinal images use multi-kernel support vector regression (SVR) to improve the quality of the captured images. The experimental results with respect to the peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and mean squared error (MSE) show that the proposed super-resolution approach for retinal images performs better when compared to the state-of-art algorithms. Further, the hybrid architecture helps the ophthalmologists in efficient diagnosis by providing high resolution retinal images.

Placing care: embodying architecture in hospital clinics for immigrant and refugee patients.

This article is part of a hospital ethnography that investigates healthcare architecture as an aspect of an increasingly large, complex, and urgent global health issue: caring for refugees and other immigrants. It argues that hospitals are nodes in transnational social networks of immigrant and refugee patients that form assemblages of human and non-human objects. These assemblages co-produce place-specific hospital care in different hospital spaces. Place-specific tensions and power dynamics arise when refugees and immigrants come into contact with these biomedical spaces. The argument is developed by analysing waiting rooms and exam rooms in two outpatient clinics in one US hospital. The article draws its analysis from 9 months of fieldwork in 2012 that included following 69 adult immigrant and refugee patients and observing their encounters with interpreters and clinic staff. Its inclusion of a transnational dimension for understanding place-specific hospital care adds conceptual and empirical depth to the study of how place matters in 21st century hospitals.

RETRACTED: Smart health monitoring and management system: Toward autonomous wearable sensing for Internet of Things using big data analytics

Abstract The current development and growth in the arena of Internet of Things (IoT) are providing a great potential in the route of the novel epoch of healthcare. The vision of the healthcare is expansively favored, as it advances the excellence of life and health of humans, involving several health regulations. The incessant increase of the multifaceted IoT devices in health is broadly tested by challenges such as powering the IoT terminal nodes used for health monitoring, real-time data processing and smart decision and event management. In this paper, we propose a healthcare architecture which is based analysis of energy harvesting for health monitoring sensors and the realization of Big Data analytics in healthcare. The rationale of proposed architecture is twofold: (1) comprehensive conceptual framework for energy harvesting for health monitoring sensors, and (2) data processing and decision management for healthcare. The proposed architecture is three-layered architecture, that comprised (1) energy harvesting and data generation, data pre-processing, and data processing and application. We also verified the consistent data sets on Hadoop server to validate the proposed architecture based on threshold limit value (TLV). The study reveals that the proposed architecture offer valuable imminent into the field of smart health.

Architecture’s creative contributions to healing: oncology patients in the Cedars Cancer Centre

BACKGROUND: The present state of Evidence-Based Design (EBD), the dominant paradigm in healthcare architecture, arguably limits architecture’s creative contributions to healing. EBD is founded upon the principle of designing built environments based on research to optimize outcomes. However, EBD’s current heavy focus on measurable results may not sufficiently address the multidimensionality of patienthood. Using EBD, designers of Montreal’s new Cedars Cancer Centre endeavoured to create a patient-centered space that holistically addresses oncology patients’ needs. PURPOSE: Using ethnographic and architectural approaches, this study evaluates whether oncology patients’ lived experiences of the Cancer Centre correspond to designers’ original qualitative intentions for a supportive, healing environment. METHODS AND RESULTS: This paper presents results from thematic analysis of annotated architectural floor plans and transcribed interviews with sixteen Cancer Centre outpatients between January and May 2017. Themes are content-analyzed and organized according to original design aims: 1) improving patient-staff relations, 2) reducing patient stress and anxiety and 3) empowering patients. SIGNIFICANCE: Our oncology design study is the first of its kind to delve into patient backstories, intertwining them with in-depth analysis of the design process and final architectural product.Our findings promote an analytical discussion about EBD and highlight new insights about oncology design and cancer patients’ spatial needs. More broadly, we propose implications for the relationship between architecture and Whole Person Care (WPC), namely: 1) drawing out architectural lessons that increase empathy towards space’s impact on illness, thus deepening health professionals’ relationships with patients, and 2) conceptualizing application of WPC principles in healthcare design.