The advances in information technology have witnessed great progress on healthcare technologies in various domains nowadays. However, these new technologies have also made healthcare data not only much bigger but also much more difficult to handle and process. Moreover, because the data are created from a variety of devices within a short time span, the characteristics of these data are that they are stored in different formats and created quickly, which can, to a large extent, be regarded as a big data problem. To provide a more convenient service and environment of healthcare, this paper proposes a cyber-physical system for patient-centric healthcare applications and services, called Health-CPS, built on cloud and big data analytics technologies. This system consists of a data collection layer with a unified standard, a data management layer for distributed storage and parallel computing, and a data-oriented service layer. The results of this study show that the technologies of cloud and big data can be used to enhance the performance of the healthcare system so that humans can then enjoy various smart healthcare applications and services.

At present, computed tomography (CT) is widely used to assist disease diagnosis. Especially, computer aided diagnosis (CAD) based on artificial intelligence (AI) recently exhibits its importance in intelligent healthcare. However, it is a great challenge to establish an adequate labeled dataset for CT analysis assistance, due to the privacy and security issues. Therefore, this paper proposes a convolutional autoencoder deep learning framework to support unsupervised image features learning for lung nodule through unlabeled data, which only needs a small amount of labeled data for efficient feature learning. Through comprehensive experiments, it shows that the proposed scheme is superior to other approaches, which effectively solves the intrinsic labor-intensive problem during artificial image labeling. Moreover, it verifies that the proposed convolutional autoencoder approach can be extended for similarity measurement of lung nodules images. Especially, the features extracted through unsupervised learning are also applicable in other related scenarios.

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and big data, more comprehensive and powerful applications become available. Meanwhile, people pay more attention to higher QoE and QoS in a “terminal- cloud” integrated system. Specifically, both advanced terminal technologies (e.g., smart clothing) and advanced cloud technologies (e.g., big data analytics and cognitive computing in clouds) are expected to provide people with more reliable and intelligent services. Therefore, in this article we propose a Wearable 2.0 healthcare system to improve QoE and QoS of the next generation healthcare system. In the proposed system, washable smart clothing, which consists of sensors, electrodes, and wires, is the critical component to collect users' physiological data and receive the analysis results of users' health and emotional status provided by cloud-based machine intelligence.

The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has fostered growing attention to real-time locating systems (RTLSs) using radio frequency identification (RFID) for asset management, which can automatically identify and track physical objects within indoor or confined environments. Various RFID indoor locating systems have been proposed. However, most of them are inappropriate for large-scale IoT applications owing to severe radio multipath, diffraction, and reflection. In this paper, we propose a newly fashioned RTLS using active RFID for the IoT, i.e., iLocate, which locates objects at high levels of accuracy up to 30 cm with ultralong distance transmission. To achieve fine-grained localization accuracy, iLocate presents the concept of virtual reference tags. To overcome signal multipath, iLocate employs a frequency-hopping technique to schedule RFID communication. To support large-scale RFID networks, iLocate leverages the ZigBee. We implement all hardware using 2.45-GHz RFID chips so that each active tag can communicate with readers that are around 1000 m away in a free space. Our empirical study and real project deployment show the superiority of the proposed system with respect to the localization accuracy and the data transmission rate for large-scale active RFID networks.