Location and activity tracking with the cloud

Abstract

Abstract-Helping elderly people to live independently within their homes for as long as possible, before transitioning to higher levels of care, can significantly reduce healthcare expenditures. However, achieving this vision requires continuous monitoring of the condition of elderly adults within their homes. In particular, activity, gait velocity, movement, and location of elderly adults are critical biomarkers for healthy aging. We present a prototype integrating a wearable location-tracking sensor with back-end cloud-based data processing, thereby enabling real-time tracking and analysis of a large number of people simultaneously. The resulting vertically-integrated prototype provides a basic infrastructure for future work, including new products and services that offer real-time monitoring and early disease diagnosis to help elderly people live independently for as long as possible.

A scoping review of cloud computing in healthcare

“…12 articles include descriptions of basic conceptual work for cloud projects, but included no creation of a real system [ 16 , 30 , 35 , 46 , 53 , 54 , 63 , 77 , 88 - 92 ]. If applications are described they are usually in a prototype status [ 1 , 7 , 10 - 13 , 15 , 17 - 22 , 28 , 29 , 31 , 33 , 34 , 39 - 45 , 47 , 48 , 55 , 58 , 59 , 61 - 70 , 72 - 75 , 93 - 101 ]. Successful implementations of cloud systems in healthcare were only described in 13 of the 104 articles [ 9 , 25 , 27 , 32 , 36 - 38 , 51 , 57 , 60 , 71 , 78 , 102 ].…”

“…Most cloud-based services are provided using own, proprietary infrastructure. If commercial services are used, Amazon services are applied most often: Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) is referred to eleven times [ 13 , 34 , 48 , 61 , 63 , 66 , 72 , 90 , 93 , 97 ] and Amazon’s S3 service (Simple Storage Service) three times [ 25 , 29 , 40 ]. One application [ 65 ] used the Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to provide more secure services.…”

“…Patients are mainly focused in projects on personal healthcare management [ 16 , 19 , 22 , 29 , 36 - 43 , 49 , 96 ]. Medical researchers should be enabled to access large pools of data for medical research purposes [ 18 , 30 , 35 , 57 , 65 , 66 , 68 , 69 ], whereas programmers and hospital IT staff should be enabled to work on the creation of cloud-based solutions [ 8 , 34 , 53 , 62 , 93 , 95 ].…”

A cloud-based approach for smart facilities management

“…A prototype for integrating a wearable location-tracking sensor with a cloud that performs processing of sensor data is discussed in [5]. The authors use a data processing application that is hosted on the cloud and reads the location data and outputs the results to a data storage application and a visualization application (both hosted on the cloud).…”

“…Cloud-based systems directed at health and safety of people are discussed in [5][6][7]. A prototype for integrating a wearable location-tracking sensor with a cloud that performs processing of sensor data is discussed in [5].…”