Mobile Health: Advances in Research and Applications

Smart health technologies continue to gain research interest across the globe in this digital era. Researchers are focusing on advancements in healthcare systems to make human life better. Also, such advancements help in early disease diagnosis and prevention of the worst diseases. Designing smart healthcare systems is possible only because of recent developments in artificial intelligence, machine learning and IoT technologies. Though mHealth refers to all mobile devices which can communicate data, mobile phones are presently the most popular platform for mHealth delivery. Ninety-four percent of the world population owns/uses a mobile phone, making mobile phones an optimal delivery platform for mHealth interventions. mHealth may catalyse the healthcare delivery model from a historical/episodic model into a tangible/patient-centric model. mHealth is being viewed progressively by many as an essential technology metaphor to achieve rich, vigorous patient engagement, ultimately achieving a patient-centric paradigm change. This book will discuss diverse topics to explain the rapidly emerging and evolving mobile health and artificial perspective, the emergence of integrated platforms and hosted third-party tools, and the development of decentralized applications for various research domains. It presents various applications that are helpful for research scholars and scientists who are working toward identifying and pinpointing the potential of as well as the hindrances to mHealth. The wide variety in topics it presents offers readers multiple perspectives on a variety of disciplines. The aim of this edited book is to publish the latest research advancements in the convergence of automation technology, artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering and health informatics. This will help readers to grasp the extensive point of view and the essence of recent advances in this field. This book solicits contributions which include theory, case studies and computing paradigms pertaining to healthcare applications. The prospective audience would be researchers, professionals, practitioners, and students from academia and industry who work in this field. We hope the chapters presented will inspire future research from both theoretical and practical viewpoints to spur further advances in the field. A brief introduction about each chapter follows. Chapter 1 focuses on the role of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in healthcare which provides an overview of the various types of IoT devices and data generating equipment for medical information. In Chapter 2, the objective is to provide a brief discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of using IoT based technologies in healthcare such as wearable devices. Chapter 3 deals with important aspects of data science for healthcare systems, which includes various algorithms for decision support system algorithms. Chapter 4 discusses various innovative technologies like digital twins for healthcare and medical diagnosis. Chapter 5 discusses research investigating the long-term effects of pregnancy and lactation on the female body. Chapter 6 summarizes recent advances in machine and deep learning techniques for smart healthcare applications. Chapter 7 explores the research insights on using an artificial neural network with a wrapper-based feature selection to predict heart failure. Chapter 8 presents a review on context-aware mobile healthcare for smart health services in nursing homes. Chapter 9 focuses on certain machine learning methods that can help in early prediction of pandemics. Chapter 10 explores techniques and methods based on machine learning for malaria diagnosis. Chapter 11 is a complete discussion about mobile health technology to improve health-related quality of life of chronic disease patients in emerging economies. We are grateful to the authors and reviewers for their excellent contributions for making this book possible.