Proactive Healthcare and an Early Warning Mechanism for Coronary Artery Disease Patients using Internet-of-Thing Devices

Abstract

Ubiquitous Internet environment and matured key technologies of sensing devices provide diversified applications of Internet of Thing (IoT). IoT in intelligent healthcare is one of the major topics for convincing powerful functions of IoT regarding the promotion of national health policies, strategies, and plans. However, according to statistics reports, annual global mortality for cardiovascular diseases remained as high as 29%, of which coronary artery disease (CAD) is accounted for 42%. Unfortunately, almost half of the patients not knowing they are at risk of cardiovascular diseases until serious symptoms occurred. Here, we proposed an early warning system by integrating IoT, big data, and cloud computing technologies which physically linked among personal communication devices of patient/doctor, cloud systems, and hospital medical information systems. The system collects personal heart rate and metabolic equivalent (MET) features from calibrated fitness devices wore by users, and corresponding fitted curves are dynamically calculated and compared to previously trained curve patterns from 213 patients with heart diseases and 124 healthy individuals. The prototype system was already successfully developed and validated by a couple of testing cases with excellent performance. To ensure the robustness of the proposed system, now we are evaluating system reliability and trying to collect more testing samples for further validating effectiveness of the proactive healthcare mechanism.