LifeStream: A High-performance Stream Processing Engine for Waveform Data

Hospitals around the world collect massive amount of physiological data from their patients every day. Recently, there has been increasing research interest to subject this data into statistical analysis for gaining more insights and providing improved medical diagnoses. Enabling such advancements in healthcare require efficient data processing systems. In this paper, we show that currently available data processing solutions either fail to meet the performance requirements or lack simple and flexible programming interfaces. To address this problem, we propose LifeStream, a high performance stream processing engine for physiological data. LifeStream hits the sweet spot between ease of programming by providing a rich temporal query language support and performance by employing optimizations that exploit the constant frequency nature of physiological data. LifeStream demonstrates end-to-end performance up to $7.5\times$ higher than state-of-the-art streaming engines and $3.2\times$ than hand-optimized numerical libraries.