Cloud Computing Model for Handling Medical Big Data: A Mobile Hospital Pervasive Healthcare Application

The handling of big data by cloud computing is becoming a good practice in the management of information systems and can be considered one of the promising and emerging technologies in computing in many domains. Actually, big data is somewhat dependent on the cloud for the flexibility and extensions provided through virtual machines, which aids in making big data accessible. In fact, big data are huge and heterogeneous as they come from different sources and of different types i.e. structured, semi-structured, and unstructured so they require proper storage and high analysis capabilities. Cloud computing seems like a suitable repository to store such data in a decision support system. In fact, data stored in the cloud can be extracted and accessed easily since cloud technology allows access to big data and computer resources from anywhere and at any time that a network connection is available. Big data and cloud computing have opened many research possibilities in different sectors. Among them are those engaged in the field of healthcare. The healthcare sector generates each year a high volume of data to be analyzed to solve organizations’ problems, predict epidemics, detect diseases and reduce healthcare costs. The aim of this paper is to shed the light on how cloud computing as an emerging paradigm is improving the healthcare sector, especially in rural zones. To this end, we propose a pervasive healthcare cloud solution to store medical big data collected by medical staff via mobile devices and to deliver that data to the medical cloud center for processing, analysis, and decision-making.