Multidisciplinary research in e-Health: Challenges and thoughts

This paper attempts to shed some light on challenges encountered when researching e-Health, along with some thoughts on addressing them. The nature of e-Health requires putting together groups of multidisciplinary researchers. This complex, yet exciting, work environment presents several challenges that should be addressed in order to enhance e-Health studies. Issues regarding the system design and acceptance create challenges of their own and are discussed. Further challenges present themselves in aspects related to the data used for e-Health, some specific problems in this domain are related to obtaining labeled data for study, privacy issues, and dataset size. The paper also discusses the analysis of data and whether traditional expert experience is used or machine learning and data mining methods are preferred. While there is no claim to solve all the challenges raised, several directions on how to mitigate them and encourage research, in the fascinating area of e-Health, are suggested.