Developing remote patient monitoring infrastructure using commercially available cloud platforms

Area of Science:

• Healthcare technology
• Cloud computing
• Data security

Background:

• Continuous patient monitoring via wearable sensors generates vast amounts of data.
• Ensuring Patient Health Information (PHI) security and privacy is critical.
• Compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) presents development challenges for remote monitoring.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel Internet of Things (IoT) architecture for healthcare.
• To demonstrate the development of HIPAA-compliant health monitoring systems using commercial cloud platforms.
• To evaluate the performance and cost-effectiveness of cloud infrastructures for healthcare applications.

Main Methods:

• Designed an IoT architecture leveraging Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• Implemented cloud functionalities for scalability, security, and load balancing.
• Conducted a cost analysis and performance evaluation of Azure and AWS infrastructures, including data processing speeds and database query latencies.

Main Results:

• The proposed IoT architecture facilitates the creation of HIPAA-compliant health monitoring systems.
• Analysis provides insights into the cost and performance metrics of Azure and AWS for healthcare.
• Cloud platforms offer essential features for managing large volumes of patient data securely.

Conclusions:

• Commercial cloud platforms effectively support the development of scalable and secure healthcare monitoring systems.
• The presented architecture simplifies adherence to HIPAA regulations for remote patient monitoring.
• Performance and cost evaluations offer valuable guidance for selecting cloud solutions in healthcare.