Real-time health data acquisition and geospatial monitoring: A visual analytics approach

Information Technology can vastly improve the quality of healthcare by providing fast, secure, efficient and inexpensive ways to acquire, store and analyze patient data electronically. Data acquisition systems help deal a large number of patients at hospitals, especially during an epidemic spread. The patient data can then be analyzed in real-time to visually monitor disease spread and take preventive measures to circumvent it. This paper focuses on the development of a 3-tier HL-71 compliant web and mobile based data acquisition and monitoring system. The use of centralized and shareable database makes it feasible to store all the data at one inventory, as health data from the far-flung rural areas is collected primarily using mobile applications. The experimental results of our system demonstrate its efficiency, ease of use and the ability to analyze real-time streaming health data along with temporal and spatial monitoring of disease outbreaks at a very granular (Mohalla2) level for the Lahore city. The developed system not only collects healthcare data, but also provides real-time monitoring of fatal diseases through the spatiotemporal analysis of the collected data.