Big Data Challenges and Opportunities in Healthcare Informatics and Smart Hospitals Mohammed K. Hassan, Ali I. El Desouky, Sally M. Elghamrawy and Amany M. Sarhan Abstract Healthcare informatics is undergoing a revolution because of the avail- ability of safe, wearable sensors at low cost. Smart hospitals have exploited the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to create Remote Patients moni- toring (RPM) models that observe patients at their homes. RPM is one of the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications. The long-term monitoring of patients using the AALs generates big data. Therefore, AALs must adopt cloud-based architectures to store, process and analyze big data. The usage of big data analytics for handling and analyzing the massive amount of big medical data will make a big shift in the health- care field. Advanced software frameworks such as Hadoop will promote the success of medical assistive applications because it allows the storage of data in its native form not only in the form of electronic medical records that can be stored in data warehouses. Also, Spark and its machine learning libraries accelerate the analysis of big medical data ten times faster than MapReduce. The advanced cloud technologies that are capable of handling big data give great hope for developing smart healthcare systems that can provide innovative medical services. Building smart Remote patient monitoring models using cloud-based technologies will preserve the lives of patients, especially the elderly who live alone. A case study for monitoring patients suffer- ing from chronic diseases (blood pressure disorders) for 24 h with a reading every M. K. Hassan (B ) · A. I. El Desouky Department of Computer Engineering and Systems, Faculty of Engineering, Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt e-mail: m_kamal1976@hotmail.com A. I. El Desouky e-mail: prof.dr.ali.eldosouky@gmail.com S. M. Elghamrawy Department of Computer Engineering, MISR Higher Institute for Engineering and Technology, Mansoura, Egypt e-mail: sally_elghamrawy@ieee.org; sally@mans.edu.eg A. M. Sarhan Department of Computer Engineering and Automatic Control, Faculty of Engineering, Tanta University, Tanta, Egypt e-mail: prof.dr.amany.sarhan@gmail.com © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 A. E. Hassanien et al. (eds.), Security in Smart Cities: Models, Applications, and Challenges, Lecture Notes in Intelligent Transportation and Infrastructure, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01560-2_1 3