Sensed Data Sharing In Cloud Federation For Advances In Health Information Exchange

In this paper the authors focus on sensing systems supporting data exchange among several healthcare administrative domains. The challenge in this area is twofold: efficient management of a huge amount of data produced by medical devices, bio-sensors and information systems, sharing sensed data for scientific and clinical purposes. The authors present a new information system that exploits Cloud computing capabilities to overcome such issues, also guaranteeing patients' privacy. Their proposal integrates different healthcare institutions into a federated environment, thus establishing a trust context among the institutions themselves. The storage service is designed according to a fully distributed approach and it is based on the wide-used Open Source framework Hadoop, which is enriched to establish a compelling federated system. They adopt the XRI technology to formalize an XML-based data model which allows to simplify the classification, searching and retrieval of medical data.