Keynote Paper: From EDA to IoT eHealth: Promises, Challenges, and Solutions

The interaction between technology and healthcare has a long history. However, recent years have witnessed the rapid growth and adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, the advent of miniature wearable biosensors, and research advances in big data techniques for effective manipulation of large, multiscale, multimodal, distributed, and heterogeneous data sets. These advances have generated new opportunities for personalized precision eHealth and mHealth services. IoT heralds a paradigm shift in the healthcare horizon by providing many advantages, including availability and accessibility, ability to personalize and tailor content, and cost-effective delivery. Although IoT eHealth has vastly expanded the possibilities to fulfill a number of existing healthcare needs, many challenges must still be addressed in order to develop consistent, suitable, safe, flexible, and power-efficient systems that are suitable fit for medical needs. To enable this transformation, it is necessary for a large number of significant technological advancements in the hardware and software communities to come together. This keynote paper addresses all these important aspects of novel IoT technologies for smart healthcare-wearable sensors, body area sensors, advanced pervasive healthcare systems, and big data analytics. It identifies new perspectives and highlights compelling research issues and challenges, such as scalability, interoperability, device-network-human interfaces, and security, with various case studies. In addition, with the help of examples, we show how knowledge from CAD areas, such as large scale analysis and optimization techniques can be applied to the important problems of eHealth.