Personalized Healthcare System for Chronic Disease Care in Cloud Environment

© 2014 ETRI Journal, Volume 36, Number 5, October 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.4218/etrij.14.2214.0070 The rapid increase in the number of patients with chronic diseases is an important public healthcare issue in many countries, which accelerates many studies on a healthcare system that can, whenever and wherever, extract and process patient data. A patient with a chronic disease conducts self-management in an out-of-hospital environment, particularly in an at-home environment, so it is important to provide integrated and personalized healthcare services for effective care. To help provide effective care for chronic disease patients, we propose a service flow and a new cloud-based personalized healthcare system architecture supporting both at-home and at-hospital environments. The system considers the different characteristics of at-hospital and at-home environments, and it provides various chronic disease care services. A prototype implementation and a predicted cost model are provided to show the effectiveness of the system. The proposed personalized healthcare system can support cost-effective disease care in an at-hospital environment and personalized self-management of chronic disease in an at-home environment.