A Data Capturing Platform in the Cloud for Behavioral Analysis among Smokers: An Application Platform for Public Health Research

Technology in the Cloud frameworks for healthcare data management and analytics has opened new horizons for public health research. Smoking is an addictive behavior and increases risk of death from different diseases, such as heart attacks or lung cancer. Nowadays, electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) are becoming popular in western countries and it has been recommended as an effective tool for smoking abstinence. However, smoking behavior and the efficacy of e-cigarette applications are insufficiently studied. This work presents a novel, Cloud-based infrastructure for data collection and storage to capture smoking behavior with e-cigarette. A user's smoking data generated by the daily use of e-cigarettes is uploaded to the cloud through mobile internet and a Bluetooth connection between a smart phone and the e-cigarette. All personal identity can be encrypted and a study identity number will be assigned to each subject for data privacy protection. The remote platform in the cloud can provide efficient analytic performance on a huge volume of data with high velocity of data creation. Data mining on smoking behavior will help to better understand the ways of using the e-cigarette. This data infrastructure will also be potentially used in other epidemiological studies in public health.