A Sustainable Future in Digital Health: Leveraging Environmentally Friendly Architectural Tactics for Sustainable...

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Environmental Science
• Healthcare Informatics

Background:

• The exponential growth of big data in healthcare presents significant environmental challenges.
• Optimizing data processing is crucial to mitigate the ecological footprint of healthcare systems.
• Current Microservices Architecture (MSA) lacks integrated environmental sustainability metrics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and evaluate a pilot architectural framework for assessing the sustainability of Big Healthcare Data (BHD) systems.
• To integrate environmentally friendly metrics into MSA for healthcare applications.
• To enhance architectural tactics for energy and carbon efficiency in BHD systems.

Main Methods:

• Developed a pilot architectural framework for BHD systems utilizing MSA.
• Incorporated energy and carbon efficiency models into the framework.
• Employed a controller for real-time monitoring and modeling to adjust microservice deployment in cloud-native architectures.

Main Results:

• The framework enables the evaluation of sustainability at various abstraction levels within BHD systems.
• Demonstrated the feasibility of applying sustainability-driven metrics to cloud-native healthcare architectures.
• Provided a method for estimating the environmental impact of BHD systems from multiple perspectives.

Conclusions:

• The proposed framework offers a novel approach to measure and improve the environmental sustainability of healthcare data processing.
• Integrating energy and carbon efficiency metrics into MSA is a viable strategy for greener BHD systems.
• This research paves the way for more eco-conscious design and operation of large-scale healthcare data infrastructures.