CareNet: Building Regulation-Compliant Home-Based Healthcare Services with Software-Defined Infrastructure

Healthcare network and computing infrastructure is rapidly changing from closed environments to open environments that incorporate new devices and new application scenarios. Home-based healthcare is such an example of leveraging pervasive sensors and analyzing sensor data (often in real-time) to guide therapy or intervene. In this paper, we address the challenges in regulatory compliance when designing and deploying healthcare applications on a heterogeneous cloud environment. We propose the CareNet framework, consisting of a set of APIs and secure data transmission mechanisms, to facilitate the specification of home-based healthcare services running on the software-defined infrastructure (SDI). This work is a collaboration among computer scientists, medical researchers, healthcare IT and healthcare providers, and its goal is to reduce the gap between the availability of SDI and meeting regulatory compliance in healthcare applications. Our prototype demonstrates the feasibility of the framework and serves as testbed for novel experimental studies of emerging healthcare applications.