Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Summary
As an emerging state-of-the-art technology, cloud computing has been
applied to an extensive range of real-life situations. Health care service is
one of such important application fields. We developed a ubiquitous health
care system, named HCloud, after comprehensive evaluation of requirements
of health care applications. It is provided based on a cloud computing plat-
form with characteristics of loose coupling algorithm modules and powerful
parallel computing capabilities that compute the details of those indicators
for the purpose of preventive health care service. First, raw physiological sig-
nals are collected from the body sensors by wired or wireless connections
and then transmitted through a gateway to the cloud platform, where storage
and analysis of the health status are performed through data-mining tech-
nologies. Last, results and suggestions can be fed back to the users instantly
for implementing personalized services that are delivered via a heteroge-
neous network. The proposed system can support huge physiological data
storage; process heterogeneous data for various health care applications, such
as automated electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis; and provide an early warn-
ing mechanism for chronic diseases. The architecture of the HCloud platform
for physiological data storage, computing, data mining, and feature selections
is described. Also, an online analysis scheme combined with a Map-Reduce
parallel framework is designed to improve the platform's capabilities.
Performance evaluation based on testing and experiments under various
conditions have demonstrated the effectiveness and usability of this system.
8.1 Introduction
As the pace of life grows ever faster these days, the physical and psychologi-
cal pressures on people are increasing ceaselessly, which raises the potential
risks for many chronic diseases, such as high blood pressure (HBP), diabetes,
and coronary disease. The large proportion of other adults who are suffer-
ing from “subhealthy” status (also called “the third state,” which is between
health and disease) are mainly engaged in brain work under high mental
pressure. A total of 75% of the world's population are jeopardized by this
negative situation
[1]
. The majority of them are white-collar workers and
social elites, and they pay increasing attention to their health while hoping
to obtain preventive health examinations periodically. Particularly, the aging
issue worldwide is becoming more serious, and we need measures to improve
the quality of life and launch chronic disease surveillance for elderly people.
However, it is well known that public medical resources are usually insuffi-
cient and imbalanced in geographical distribution. According to a report of
Search WWH ::
Custom Search