Survey on Context-Aware Healthcare Systems

Smart healthcare has promoted E-healthcare to a higher level in which healthcare and treatment services are ubiquitously and intelligently offered to users. Context-awareness is an important feature in smart healthcare systems that firstly deals with extracting current contextual information of users including patients, doctors, and nurses. Afterwards, by being aware of current context and situation of users, smart healthcare systems are able to provide autonomous and intelligent services to them. Due to the importance of this subject, several context-aware healthcare systems have been proposed in various aspects of healthcare and treatment; however, to our best knowledge not any survey paper has investigated and reviewed them. In this regards, this paper studies context-aware healthcare systems from four central viewpoints including environment, service type, context type and context source. The aim is to technically discuss and classify context-aware healthcare systems, to identify the advancements and shortcomings, and to illuminate the route for future research directions in this area.