Extended provisioning, security and analysis techniques for the ECHO health data management system

Abstract

eHealth gains more and more interest since a lot of end-user devices supporting health data capturing are available. The captured data has to be managed and securely stored, in order to access it from different devices and share it with other users such as physicians. The aim of the german-greek research project ECHO is to support the treatment of patients, who suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a chronic respiratory disease. Usually the patients need to be examined by their physicians on a regular basis due to their chronic condition. Since this is very time consuming and expensive we developed an eHealth system which allows the physician to monitor patients condition remotely, e.g., via smart phones. This article is an extension of previous work, where we introduced a health data model and an associated platform-architecture for the management and analysis of the data provided by the patients. There we have also shown how the security of the data is ensured and we explained how the platform can be provided in a cloud-based environment using the OASIS standard TOSCA, which enables a self-contained management of cloud-services. In this article we provide a more detailed description about the health data analysis, provisioning and security aspects of the eHealth system.