HCloud: A novel application-oriented cloud platform for preventive healthcare

As an emerging state-of-the-art technology, cloud computing has been applied to an extensive range of real life situations. Healthcare is one of such important application fields. We developed a healthcare system, named HCloud, after comprehensive analysis of requirements of healthcare, which based on cloud platform with characteristics of loose coupling algorithms modules and powerful parallel computing capabilities to compute the detail of these indicators for the purpose of preventive healthcare service. The proposed system can support huge physiological data storage and process heterogeneous data for various health care applications such as automated electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis, providing an early warning mechanism for users with chronic disease. The architecture of the cloud platform for physiological data storage, computing, data mining, and feature selections are described. Performance evaluations based on testing has demonstrated the effectiveness and usability of the system.