Automation in Systematic, Scoping and Rapid Reviews by an NLP Toolkit: A Case Study in Enhanced Living Environments

Abstract

With the increasing number of scientific publications, the analysis of the trends and the state-of-the-art in a certain scientific field is becoming very time-consuming and tedious task. In response to urgent needs of information, for which the existing systematic review model does not well, several other review types have emerged, namely the rapid review and scoping reviews. In this paper, we propose an NLP powered tool that automates most of the review process by automatic analysis of articles indexed in the IEEE Xplore, PubMed, and Springer digital libraries. We demonstrate the applicability of the toolkit by analyzing articles related to Enhanced Living Environments and Ambient Assisted Living, in accordance with the PRISMA surveying methodology. The relevant articles were processed by the NLP toolkit to identify articles that contain up to 20 properties clustered into 4 logical groups. The analysis showed increasing attention from the scientific communities towards Enhanced and Assisted living environments over the last 10 years and showed several trends in the specific research topics that fall into this scope. The case study demonstrates that the NLP toolkit can ease and speed up the review process and show valuable insights from the surveyed articles even without manually reading of most of the articles. Moreover, it pinpoints the most relevant articles which contain more properties and therefore, significantly reduces the manual work, while also generating informative tables, charts and graphs.

Aging at Work: A Review of Recent Trends and Future Directions

“…Thus, we used natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to perform an efficient search of the identified literature. The NLP toolkit [ 26 ] was designed to automate the literature search by using different search phrases, scanning, and evaluating eligibility within the PRISMA framework while generating visualizations of aggregate results. The NLP toolkit provides increased efficiency of the review process by screening the title and abstract while using the predetermined properties and their synonyms to determine the literature search phrases.…”

“…Finally, the NLP toolkit automatically generated charts (such as Figure 2 , Figure 3 , Figure 4 and Figure 5 ) that highlight the trends of publications for certain topics. For more details about the inner workings of the NLP-based toolkit, we refer interested readers to [ 26 ], and also to [ 27 ], which applied it to review wearable technology for connected health.…”

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“…These databases include study in different subjects, including medicine, computer science, sociology, psychology, and others. We used an Natural Language Processing (NLP)-based framework to automatically search the digital libraries and identify potentially relevant papers [33]. The framework also automatically removed duplicates, as well as papers according to our inclusion and exclusion criteria.…”

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“…The research terms used to identify relevant articles for this systematic review are: "diseases", "accelerometer", and "automatic identification" or "automatic recognition". Initially, we employed a tool that leverages Natural Language Processing algorithms [57] to remove duplicate articles and narrow down the potentially relevant articles. Afterwards, five reviewers independently evaluated every study, and its suitability was determined with the agreement of all parties.…”