The Role of Big Data in Aging and Older People’s Health Research: A Systematic Review and Ecological Framework

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors provide an interesting analysis and review focusing on the subject on ageing citizens and countries through the analysis of big data.

Nevertheless, there are sections that need improvement:

1. The abstract is above the 200 hundred words and so this section does not follow the requirements of the journal. In this sense, why the authors have not used the adequate template?
2. The introduction presents interestingly the background, but references are missing, such as "data from World Bank", the expression and writing difficulties the reading, some ideas are present as cohesive but lack the flow and link between concepts, the concept of a sustainability from the perspective of a health care system is missing, and previous studies or similar papers in this area have not been included. 
3. The background and definition of the concepts has been written more precisely and provides a better understanding of why choosing the topic, although, some ideas are missing. I would highly recommend the authors to improve the introduction since that section would provide further depth to the background. 
4. The methodology is missing the PICO question, the inclusion and exclusion criteria, further description of the process such be included, for instance the authors indicated that the papers from different fields were excluded, why was the reasoning?, were the selection of keywords based on  MeSH  terms? . Besides the quality of the flow diagram is really low, please change it.
5. The authors have analysed the studies found and topic, but it would be interesting to the analysis of the methodological quality. Please include a Table or Annex that provides the quality of the studies selected.
6. The results and discussion section needs to be improve regarding the writing and presentation, and the limitations and implications to the filed are missing. Moreover, the discussion seems to be superficial 
7. The conclusions are adequate, but the last sentence seems more an opinion rather than a research conclusion obtained from the analysis. Please rewrite the sentence "In fact, with good use of big data, the development of theory on aging society has just begun."

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

In this paper, authors presented an ecological framework of big data in order to explain its role in older people healthcare. However, there are some limitations that must be addressed as follows.

1. The abstract is very lengthy, and the main contribution is not clear here. Some sentences in abstract should be modified. In addition, there some grammatical mistakes. These should be removed.
2. In Introduction section, it is difficult to understand the novelty or the main aim of the presented work. This section should be modified carefully.
3. The title of section 2 should be changed. The three basic concepts for what?
4. The most recent work about healthcare system should be discussed (‘An intelligent healthcare monitoring framework using wearable sensors and social networking data’, ‘A smart healthcare monitoring system for heart disease prediction based on ensemble deep learning and feature fusion’, Early prediction of circulatory failure in the intensive care unit using machine learning’, ‘Alzheimer’s disease progression detection model based on an early fusion of cost-effective multimodal data’, ‘Machine Learning for Health (ML4H) 2020: Advancing Healthcare for All’)
5. Queries in table are not clear.
6. The font style of subsections should be changed.
7. Captions of the Figures not self-explanatory. The caption of figures should be self-explanatory, and clearly explaining the figure. Extend the description of the mentioned figures to make them self-explanatory.
8. The whole manuscript should be thoroughly revised in order to improve its English.
9. In the manuscript, it will be better to discuss the experimental results of the existing system about bigdata for chronic patient healthcare.

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review this manuscript. You have a touched on an important topic. Although the some novel ideas are presented, I give some specific comments for authors to improve the manuscript. 

The first paragraph in introduction, authors should add some references. 

In the literature review of “three Basic Concepts”, this section is too prolix and repetitive. I don’t understand the role of this section. What is the gap? Also, it seems like the author was only summarizing the findings from other paper instead of reviewing them.   

As to the database selection, authors mentioned “a systematic literature search of 4 electronic databases, Scopus (1960 to September 2020), Web of  Science (1900 to September 2020), CNKI (1915 to September 2020), and WANFANG (1900 to September 2020) was conducted. The detailed query strings are shown in Table 1 below”(Lines 177-179). I think the authors missed some important databases like CINAHL, Medline/PubMed, SciELO, Cochrane Library Plus. Please explain why these two local databases (i.e. CNKI and WANFANG) were selected.

Your findings have stayed at surface level. I had hoped for a more thoroughly and insightfully analysis. The assessment any strengths and limitations of the existing research (including underlying assumptions/biases or validity) is scarce. 

In Table 1, please explain how these keywords were screened out. Is there any expert pre-test procedure?

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

1. The abstract should contain the analytical methodology for the paper.
2. The analytical approach was not adequately mentioned. Please clearly state how the data are collected and how the data was analyzed. 
3. The conclusion section should clearly state the result of the research and also compare it with other relevant literature. 

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

First of all, I would like to thank and congratulate the authors for all the changes and modifications made. I think that such changes have improved the quality of the manuscript, although I would recommend that the supplementary file should be included in the research. The tables provide relevance and further quality, therefore, please, include the table inside the manuscript as annexes or tables in the correct section

Author Response

Thank you for your acknowledgment and support. As for your suggestion “to include supplementary file in the research”, we agreed that it was appropriate and improved the structure of section 3. Please find the added statement and table in resubmitted manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have addressed my all comments. I have no further comments.

Author Response

Thanks a lot for your acknowledgment and support. We are glad that the revision fulfills your comments. 

Reviewer 3 Report

It seems that the authors have tried their best to revise the manuscript. The paper has improved since the earlier version but could use further enhancement. The comment, “In Table 1, please explain how these keywords were screened out. Is there any expert pre-test procedure?” actually asked whether the authors had conducted any rigorous pre-test on keyword selection. I don't think the authors have adequately answered this question.

Author Response

Thanks a lot for your constructive comments that guiding us in improving this manuscript. In respect of your latest comment, our response stated as below:

The keywords were selected after an informal seminar among our research team members. And a simple search trial was checked before final determination. However, we thought it was not a qualified “rigorous pre-test” with-validation or support from information specialist. We are going to conduct an examination for further improvement.