Health 4.0: On the Way to Realizing the Healthcare of the Future

Health 4.0 establishes a new promising vision for the healthcare industry. It creatively integrates and employ innovative technologies such as the Internet of Health Things (IoHT), medical Cyber-Physical Systems (medical CPS), health cloud, health fog, big data analytics, machine learning, blockchain, and smart algorithms. The goal is to deliver improved, value-added and cost-effective healthcare services to patients and enhance the effectiveness and efficiency or the healthcare industry. Health 4.0 (adapted from the Industry 4.0 principles) changes the healthcare business model to enhance the interactions across the healthcare clients (the patients), stakeholders, infrastructure, and value chain. This effectively will improve the quality, flexibility, productivity, cost-effectiveness, and reliability of healthcare services in addition to increasing patients’ satisfaction. However, building and utilizing healthcare applications that follow the Health 4.0 concept is a non-trivial and complex endeavor. In addition, advanced potential applications based on Health 4.0 capabilities are not yet being investigated. In this paper we define the main objectives of Health 4.0 and discuss advanced potential Health 4.0 applications. To have a clear understanding of these applications, we categorize them in 4 groups based on the primary beneficiary of these applications. Thus we have patient targeted applications, applications supporting healthcare professionals, resource management applications and high-level healthcare systems management applications. In addition, as we studied the different applications, we realized that these is a certain collection of services that these most of them need regardless of their goals or business context. Services supporting data collection and transfer, security and privacy, reliable operations are some examples. As a result we propose creating a service-oriented middleware framework to offers the common services to the applications developers and facilitate the integration of different services to build applications under the Health 4.0 umbrella.