Health monitoring and its related technologies is an attractive research area. The electrocardiogram (ECG) has always been a popular measurement scheme to assess and diagnose cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). The number of ECG monitoring systems in the literature is expanding exponentially. Hence, it is very hard for researchers and healthcare experts to choose, compare, and evaluate systems that serve their needs and fulfill the monitoring requirements. This accentuates the need for a verified reference guiding the design, classification, and analysis of ECG monitoring systems, serving both researchers and professionals in the field. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive, expert-verified taxonomy of ECG monitoring systems and conduct an extensive, systematic review of the literature. This provides evidence-based support for critically understanding ECG monitoring systems’ components, contexts, features, and challenges. Hence, a generic architectural model for ECG monitoring systems is proposed, an extensive analysis of ECG monitoring systems’ value chain is conducted, and a thorough review of the relevant literature, classified against the experts’ taxonomy, is presented, highlighting challenges and current trends. Finally, we identify key challenges and emphasize the importance of smart monitoring systems that leverage new technologies, including deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT), to provide efficient, cost-aware, and fully connected monitoring systems.

Cardio Vascular Diseases (CVD) is the leading cause of death globally and is increasing at an alarming rate, according to the American Heart Association’s Heart Attack and Stroke Statistics-2021. This increase has been further exacerbated because of the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, thereby increasing the pressure on existing healthcare resources. Smart and Connected Health (SCH) is a viable solution for the prevalent healthcare challenges. It can reshape the course of healthcare to be more strategic, preventive, and custom-designed, making it more effective with value-added services. This research endeavors to classify state-of-the-art SCH technologies via a thorough literature review and analysis to comprehensively define SCH features and identify the enabling technology-related challenges in SCH adoption. We also propose an architectural model that captures the technological aspect of the SCH solution, its environment, and its primary involved stakeholders. It serves as a reference model for SCH acceptance and implementation. We reflected the COVID-19 case study illustrating how some countries have tackled the pandemic differently in terms of leveraging the power of different SCH technologies, such as big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, robotics, blockchain, and mobile applications. In combating the pandemic, SCH has been used efficiently at different stages such as disease diagnosis, virus detection, individual monitoring, tracking, controlling, and resource allocation. Furthermore, this review highlights the challenges to SCH acceptance, as well as the potential research directions for better patient-centric healthcare.

While the potential benefits of Big Data adoption are significant, and some initial successes have already been realized, there remain many research and technical challenges that must be addressed to fully realize this potential. The Big Data processing, storage and analytics, of course, are major challenges that are most easily recognized. However, there are additional challenges related for instance to Big Data collection, integration, and quality enforcement. This paper proposes a hybrid approach to Big Data quality evaluation across the Big Data value chain. It consists of assessing first the quality of Big Data itself, which involve processes such as cleansing, filtering and approximation. Then, assessing the quality of process handling this Big Data, which involve for example processing and analytics process. We conduct a set of experiments to evaluate Quality of Data prior and after its pre-processing, and the Quality of the pre-processing and processing on a large dataset. Quality metrics have been measured to access three Big Data quality dimensions: accuracy, completeness, and consistency. The results proved that combination of data-driven and process-driven quality evaluation lead to improved quality enforcement across the Big Data value chain. Hence, we recorded high prediction accuracy and low processing time after we evaluate 6 well-known classification algorithms as part of processing and analytics phase of Big Data value chain.