Toward a smart health: big data analytics and IoT for real-time miscarriage prediction

BackgroundWe are living in an age where data is everywhere and grows up in a very speedy way. Thanks to sensors, mobile phones and social networks, we can gather a hug amount of information to understand human behavior as well as his individual life. In healthcare system, big data analytics and machine learning algorithms prove their effectiveness and efficiency in saving lives and predicting new diseases. This triggered the idea of taking advantages of those tools and algorithms to create systems that involve both doctors and patients in the treatment of disease, predict outcomes and use real-time risk factors from sensors and mobile phones.MethodsWe distinguish three types of data: data from sensors, data from mobile phones and data registered or updated by the patient in a mobile app we created. We take advantages from IoT systems such as Raspberry Pi to collect and process data coming from sensors. All data collected is sent to a NoSql Server to be then analyzed and processed in Databricks Spark. K-means centroid clustering algorithms is used to build the predictive model, create partitions and make predictions. To validate results in term of efficiency and effectiveness, we used clustering validations techniques: Random K, Silhouette and Elbow methods.ResultsThe main contribution of our work is the implementation of a new system that has the capability to be applied in several prediction disease researches using Big Data Analytics and IoT. Also, comparing to other studies in literature that use only medical or maternal risk factors from echography; our work had the advantage to use real-time risk factors (maternal and medical) gathered from sensors, react in advance and track diseases. As a case study, we create an e-monitoring real-time miscarriage prediction system to save baby's lives and help pregnant women. In fact, doctors receive the results of clustering and track theirs patient through our mobile app to react in term of miscarriage to avoid non-suitable outcomes. While pregnant women receive only advices based on their behaviors. The system uses 15 real-time risk factors and our dataset contains more than 1,000,000 JSON files. Elbow method affirm three as the optimal number of clusters and we reach 0.99 as a value of Silhouette method, which is a good sign that clusters are well separated and matched.