Pervasive Health Care: The Six Dimensions Of Big Data

pressure, operating room monitors for anesthesia, bedside heart monitors, etc.) can mean the difference between life and death. The enormous variety of data—structured, unstructured and semi-structured—is a dimension that makes healthcare data both interesting and challenging. Structured data is data that can be easily stored, queried, recalled, analyzed and manipulated by machine. Historically, in healthcare, structured and semi-structured data includes instrument readings and data generated by the ongoing conversion of paper records to electronic health and medical records. Historically, the point of care generated unstructured data: office medical records, handwritten nurse and doctor notes, hospital admission and discharge records, paper

It demonstrates holistically the role of big data in delivering pervasive healthcare. In this research context, an architectural framework from the organizational perspective should portrays the six dimensions (adapted from Sowa and Zach man, 1992): W ho are the users of the architecture, what are the components in the architecture and why these components are required, the mechanism of big data provision in supporting pervasive healthcare and where big data is stored. The architecture hence consists of four main domains that reflect the six dimensions: Stakeholders, pervasive health care applications, pervasive health care data provision and big data source.

These stakeholders can be either data providers or users, depending on what context they provide and use data

Patient monitoring enables healthcare professionals to remotely monitor patient’s health condition. Location-based medical services enable pervasive healthcare service provider to track the location of the elderly or the mental health patients who are ambulatory but restricted to certain areas and to help patients locating the nearest healthcare facility. Incident detection notifies healthcare professionals if there is a critical change on patient’s health condition. Emergency responses and management efficiently facilitates the emergency services by dispatching the nearest ambulatory vehicles to where the emergency event happens and sending patients to the nearest hospital. Pervasive access to medical data allows healthcare professionals or patients to view and update the clinical records by using the mobile devices.