The cloud has assisted almost every industry in modernizing and building more efficient ways of performing. Integrated medical technologies are revolutionizing how hospitals, healthcare centers, and care providers communicate with one another and their patients. The healthcare data management system records patients’ data in diverse patterns specified as multimedia data including as text, numerically, in pictures, and videos. This generates big data which is unstructured and gathered from different geographical locations. The cloud can play a major role in this and offer an effective solution. With the increasing amount of data, it is paramount to be able to manage multimodal data to enhance application performance in healthcare with wired and wireless technology. In order to manage the data and to efficiently mitigate the complexity in real-time, innovation is required including advancements in the cloud and the development of new algorithms to secure change in the healthcare industry. The evolving health cloud technology has its own challenges. It assembles multimedia data from huge sources, plays a key part in managing whole patient details, and aids in connecting specialists, nurses, and care providers for accurate diagnosis and effective treatments and better experience for patients.

Although technologies are evolving, security is the primary concern that remains unresolved for e-medical data. Advanced security measures in data access and retrieval are vital for providing defence for critical and high-profile medical records of patients. Biometric technology is evolving as a necessary technology in the present digital ecosystem for identification and access control for high-end surveillance of individuals. Biometric authentication technologies such as biometric modalities which include fingerprint, iris, voice, signature, facial, palm print recognition, etc., are increasing in demand and their deployment across the medical field is widespread as they are user-friendly, can recognize identity theft and unauthorized access or documentary fraud, and ensure high security, accuracy, and scalability. The expansion of biometric-based solutions is a significant development and promotes growth that impacts medical industry competitors and end-user organizations. Biometric statistical analysis has significant value for improving system reliability and specialization. As the healthcare industry is transforming toward a more personalized smart care model, multimedia biometric system-based authentication schemes need to advance to the next level with the ever-increasing requests to secure end-users against cyber-attacks. Moreover, the collection of multimedia data is a critical challenge which requires an optimized framework and utilizing intelligent approaches to tackle this complexity. The considerable advances in multimedia modeling for biometric applications and the need for efficient data management have created a demand to adopt cloud-based services, and novel technology to develop cutting-edge improvements in security and to overcome limitations.

This Special Issue discusses the demand for cloud-based systems and multimedia modeling in the management of healthcare data for ensuring a high accuracy rate in secure data access and retrieval with innovative biometric authentication schemes, frameworks, and state-of-the-art algorithms for performance enhancement. We welcome both original research and review papers.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Intelligent algorithms in multimedia for biometric identification and verification with secure architecture for the health cloud
• Enabling technologies and algorithms in multimedia for privacy-preserving in the health cloud
• Multimedia biometrics modelling frameworks and applications for personalized health cloud
• Multimedia big data analytics and smart biometric authentication models for health cloud development
• Health cloud and the internet of things (IoT) for improving cybersecurity and managing healthcare data breaches
• Multimedia modelling and AI for automatic detection of data vulnerabilities in the health cloud
• Trends and challenges of biometric multifactor authentication schemes and preventing potential risks in the health cloud
• Impact of cloud technology and biometrics in telehealth and mHealth solutions on patient protection
• Applications of multimedia modelling in the health cloud to optimize diagnosis and treatment accuracy for improving patient experience
• Advances in multimedia mobile edge computing for biometric identity management in health cloud for public security
• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) models for mitigating data management complexity in the health cloud