HBPF: a Home Blood Pressure Framework with SLA guarantees to follow up hypertensive patients

Hypertension or high blood pressure is a condition on the rise. Not only does it affect the elderly but is also increasingly spreading to younger sectors of the population. Treating it involves exhaustive monitoring of patients. A tool adapted to the particular requirements of hypertension can greatly facilitate monitoring and diagnosis. This paper presents HBPF, an efficient cloud-based Home Blood Pressure Framework. This allows hypertensive patients to communicate with their health-care centers, thus facilitating monitoring for both patients and clinicians. HBPF provides a complete, efficient, and cross-platform framework to follow up hypertensive patients with an SLA guarantee. Response time below one second for 80,000 requests and 28% increase in peak throughput going from one to three virtual machines were obtained. In addition, a mobile app (BP) for Android and iOS with a user-friendly interface is also provided to facilitate following up hypertensive patients. Among them, between 54% and 87% favorably evaluated the tool. BP can be downloaded for free from the website Hesoft Group repository (http://www.hesoftgroup.eu).This work was supported by the Ministerio de Enonomia y Competitividad under contracts TIN2011-28689-C02-02, TIN2014-53234-C2-2-R and BFU2010-17704. The authors are members of the research groups 2014-SGR163 and 2014-SGR243, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya