Future directions of applying health-care cloud for home-based chronic diseas care

The care of chronic disease has become the main challenge for healthcare institutions around the world. To meet the growing needs of patients, moving the front desk of healthcare from hospital to home is essential. Recently, cloud computing has been applied to healthcare domain; however, adapting to and using this technology effectively for home-based care is still in its initial phase. We have proposed a conceptual hybrid cloud model for chronic disease home-based care, and have evaluated its future feasibility by a case study of diabetes care in Blekinge, Sweden. In this paper, we discuss some possible future opportunities and challenges to apply this cloud model with the huge population for home-based chronic diseases care. To apply this model in practice, some professional IT healthcare education team is needed for both healthcare providers and healthcare recipients. For home-based healthcare, a monitoring system with an automatic alarm to healthcare providers is also necessary in some cases. Also, how to record and integrate excises data through wearable devices in a cloud should be considered as well. Given the high demand, sharing medical images through the cloud should be another research focus