Synchronous Big Data analytics for personalized and remote physical therapy

With gigabit networking becoming economically feasible and widely installed at homes, there are new opportunities to revisit in-home, personalized telehealth services. In this paper, we describe a novel telehealth eldercare service that we developed viz., "Physical Therapy-as-a-Service'' (PTaaS) that connects a remote physical therapist at a clinic to a senior at home. The service leverages a high-speed, low-latency network connection through an interactive interface built on top of Microsoft Kinect motion sensing capabilities. The interface that is built using user-centered design principles for wellness coaching exercises is essentially a 'Synchronous Big Data' application due to its: (i) high data-in-motion velocity (i.e., peak data rate is approximate to 400 Mbps), (ii) considerable variety (i.e., measurements include 3D sensing, network health, user opinion surveys and video clips of RGB, skeletal and depth data), and (iii) large volume (i.e., several GB of measurement data for a simple exercise activity). The successful PTaaS delivery through this interface is dependent on the veracity analytics needed for correlation of the real-time Big Data streams within a session, in order to assess exercise balance of the senior without any bias due to network quality effects. Our experiments with PTaaS in an actual testbed involving senior homes in Kansas City with Google Fiber connections and our university clinic demonstrate the network configuration and time synchronization related challenges in order to perform online analytics. Our findings provide insights on how to: (a) enable suitable resource calibration and perform network troubleshooting for high user experience for both the therapist and the senior, and (b) realize a Big Data architecture for PTaaS and other similar personalized healthcare services to be remotely delivered at a large-scale in a reliable, secure and cost-effective manner. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.