The need to have equitable access to quality healthcare is enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which defines the developmental agenda of the UN for the next 15 years. In particular, the third SDG focuses on the need to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”. In this paper, we build the case that 5G wireless technology, along with concomitant emerging technologies (such as IoT, big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning), will transform global healthcare systems in the near future. Our optimism around 5G-enabled healthcare stems from a confluence of significant technical pushes that are already at play: apart from the availability of high-throughput low-latency wireless connectivity, other significant factors include the democratization of computing through cloud computing; the democratization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing (e.g., IBM Watson); and the commoditization of data through crowdsourcing and digital exhaust. These technologies together can finally crack a dysfunctional healthcare system that has largely been impervious to technological innovations. We highlight the persistent deficiencies of the current healthcare system and then demonstrate how the 5G-enabled healthcare revolution can fix these deficiencies. We also highlight open technical research challenges, and potential pitfalls, that may hinder the development of such a 5G-enabled health revolution.

Speech technology is not appropriately explored even though modern advances in speech technology---especially those driven by deep learning (DL) technology---offer unprecedented opportunities for transforming the healthcare industry. In this paper, we have focused on the enormous potential of speech technology for revolutionising the healthcare domain. More specifically, we review the state-of-the-art approaches in automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech synthesis or text to speech (TTS), and health detection and monitoring using speech signals. We also present a comprehensive overview of various challenges hindering the growth of speech-based services in healthcare. To make speech-based healthcare solutions more prevalent, we discuss open issues and suggest some possible research directions aimed at fully leveraging the advantages of other technologies for making speech-based healthcare solutions more effective.

COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in March 2020. By mid-August 2020, more than 21 million people have tested positive worldwide. Infections have been growing rapidly and tremendous efforts are being made to fight the disease. In this paper, we attempt to systematise the various COVID-19 research activities leveraging data science, where we define data science broadly to encompass the various methods and tools-including those from artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), statistics, modeling, simulation, and data visualization-that can be used to store, process, and extract insights from data. In addition to reviewing the rapidly growing body of recent research, we survey public datasets and repositories that can be used for further work to track COVID-19 spread and mitigation strategies. As part of this, we present a bibliometric analysis of the papers produced in this short span of time. Finally, building on these insights, we highlight common challenges and pitfalls observed across the surveyed works. We also created a live resource repository at https://github.com/Data-Science-and-COVID-19/Leveraging-Data-Science-To-Combat-COVID-19-A-Comprehensive-Review that we intend to keep updated with the latest resources including new papers and datasets.

Traditionally, speech emotion recognition (SER) research has relied on manually handcrafted acoustic features using feature engineering. However, the design of handcrafted features for complex SER tasks requires significant manual eort, which impedes generalisability and slows the pace of innovation. This has motivated the adoption of representation learning techniques that can automatically learn an intermediate representation of the input signal without any manual feature engineering. Representation learning has led to improved SER performance and enabled rapid innovation. Its effectiveness has further increased with advances in deep learning (DL), which has facilitated \textit{deep representation learning} where hierarchical representations are automatically learned in a data-driven manner. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey on the important topic of deep representation learning for SER. We highlight various techniques, related challenges and identify important future areas of research. Our survey bridges the gap in the literature since existing surveys either focus on SER with hand-engineered features or representation learning in the general setting without focusing on SER.

Deep learning-based cardiac auscultation is of significant interest to the healthcare community as it can help reducing the burden of manual auscultation with automated detection of abnormal heartbeats. However, the problem of automatic cardiac auscultation is complicated due to the requirement of reliable and highly accurate systems, which are robust to the background noise in the heartbeat sound. In this paper, we propose a Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)-based automated cardiac auscultation solution. Our choice of RNNs is motivated by their great success of modeling sequential or temporal data even in the presence of noise. We explore the use of various RNN models, and demonstrate that these models significantly outperform the best reported results in the literature. We also present the run-time complexity of various RNNs, which provides insight about their complexity versus performance trade-offs.

The mHealth trend, which uses mobile devices and associated technology for health interventions, offers unprecedented opportunity to transform the health services available to people across the globe. In particular, the mHealth transformation can be most disruptive in the developing countries, which is often characterized by a dysfunctional public health system. Despite this opportunity, the growth of mHealth in developing countries is rather slow and no existing studies have conducted an in-depth search to identify the reasons. We present a comprehensive report about the factors hindering the growth of mHealth in developing countries. Most importantly, we outline future strategies for making mHealth even more effective. We are also the first to conduct a case study on the public health system of Pakistan showing that mHealth can offer tremendous opportunities for a developing country with a severe scarcity of health infrastructure and resources. The findings of this paper will guide the development of policies and strategies for the sustainable adoption of mHealth not only in Pakistan but also for any developing country in general.