TRANSACTIONAL PROCESSING SYSTEMS Real-time Medical Emergency Response System: Exploiting IoT and Big Data for Public Health M. Mazhar Rathore 1 & Awais Ahmad 1 & Anand Paul 1 & Jiafu Wan 2 & Daqiang Zhang 3 Received: 13 November 2015 /Accepted: 21 October 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Abstract Healthy people are important for any nation’ s de- velopment. Use of the Internet of Things (IoT)-based body area networks (BANs) is increasing for continuous monitoring and medical healthcare in order to perform real-time actions in case of emergencies. However, in the case of monitoring the health of all citizens or people in a country, the millions of sensors attached to human bodies generate massive volume of heterogeneous data, called BBig Data.^ Processing Big Data and performing real-time actions in critical situations is a chal- lenging task. Therefore, in order to address such issues, we propose a Real-time Medical Emergency Response System that involves IoT-based medical sensors deployed on the hu- man body. Moreover, the proposed system consists of the data analysis building, called BIntelligent Building,^ depicted by the proposed layered architecture and implementation model, and it is responsible for analysis and decision-making. The data collected from millions of body-attached sensors is forwarded to Intelligent Building for processing and for performing necessary actions using various units such as col- lection, Hadoop Processing (HPU), and analysis and decision. The feasibility and efficiency of the proposed system are eval- uated by implementing the system on Hadoop using an UBUNTU 14.04 LTS coreTMi5 machine. Various medical sensory datasets and real-time network traffic are considered for evaluating the efficiency of the system. The results show that the proposed system has the capability of efficiently pro- cessing WBAN sensory data from millions of users in order to perform real-time responses in case of emergencies. Keywords Big data . IoT . Healthcare . Intelligent building . Hadoop ecosystem Introduction Because of its rapid growth at the start of the 21st century, the Internet of Things (IoT) is considered a revolution in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). In the healthcare sector, use of the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) offers a novel prototype for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in monitoring biomedical sensors. The sen- sors in WBAN are adhered to human bodies or clothes in order to measure physical and medical parameters [1–3]. Such measurements can be analyzed at the local level and can be sent to the main server via Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) over a Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) [4] through a gateway. For local communication This article is part of the Topical Collection on Transactional Processing Systems. * Anand Paul paul.editor@gmail.com M. Mazhar Rathore rathoremazhar@gmail.com Awais Ahmad awais@knu.ac.kr Jiafu Wan jiafuwan_76@163.com Daqiang Zhang dqzhang@tongji.edu.cn 1 The School of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, 702-701, South Korea 2 The School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China 3 The School of Software Engineering, Tongji University, Tongji, China J Med Syst (2016) 40:283 DOI 10.1007/s10916-016-0647-6