OLAP

OLAP (on-line analytical processing) is a class of database technology that organises data into multi-dimensional 'cubes' — for example, sensor-firing counts indexed by room, time zone, day of week, and week number — and provides fast interactive slice, dice, drill-down, and roll-up operations over those dimensions. In the accessibility and telecare literature, OLAP is commonly used to explore sensor-derived activity data at different granularities (a specific morning, a weekly trend, a three-month comparison) so that clinicians or carers can notice meaningful changes without writing custom queries. OLAP sits between raw transaction databases and predictive analytics: it does not build models, but it surfaces patterns a human analyst can inspect.