Modern development technologies and health informatics: Area transformation and future trends

With the emergence of handy rapid prototyping tools and versatile hardware development kits, health informatics is ready, more than ever, to improve human well being. At present, a variety of available, easy-to-maintain, and affordable enabling technologies support quality patient care. Supporting technologies can accelerate diagnoses, reduce errors, and increase the quality of services. With such widely observed advancement, the question remains regarding what the current main health informatics area transformations are in terms of achievements, gaps, and challenges. Additionally, what are the demands and requirements posed by area transformations and future trends; and how do they affect the underlying hardware system deployments, integration of subsystems, and the architecture of the root wireless sensor nodes? In this article, we carefully survey a set of distinguished recent health informatics systems with a focus on wireless sensor node architectures, their integration, and their embedding in an application. The investigation includes the design of a generic future wireless sensor node architecture that can be customized and adopted within health informatics. Moreover, a rich set of pointers to future directions is developed based on the performed survey and the identified improvement opportunities.