Cyber-healthcare for public healthcare in the developing world

Abstract

The recent advances in sensor/actuator and RFID technologies have spun out a new healthcare model enabling capture and dissemination of patient vital signs over the Internet for ubiquitous monitoring of these patients anytime and from anywhere. This provides new opportunities for enhancing healthcare through participatory consultation, medical diagnosis and many other novel healthcare services. Some of the advantages of this emerging technology referred to in this paper as “Cyber-healthcare” includes low acquisition cost, flexible deployment and improved accuracy resulting from replacing manual operations by fully digitized processes. It is expected that the emerging healthcare technology will change the way healthcare is delivered in both rural and urban settings of the developing world by building upon this technology to leapfrog from poorly prepared to medically equipped environments capable of tackling some of the most challenging medical issues of the developing world such as patients' vital signs capture, patient prioritization and preparedness to virus outbreaks such as Ebola. This paper proposes a Cyber-healthcare system as a first step towards the implementation of least cost digital health systems in the developing countries. We assess the field readiness of the off-the-shelf sensor technology used by the system and evaluate the performance of its underlying patient prioritization module using two machine learning algorithms: 1) multivariate linear regression and 2) support vector machine.