P. Divyaja
'Health is Wealth' is the saying that carries truth for ages. Man is capable of sending rockets to other planets but still suffering from the health issues. Technological innovations in healthcare industry made it sophisticated and rich in technology and abilities to deal with various ailments. However, it became costly and lot of money is being spent by people across the globe for maintaining their health. It appears that healthcare services are not at all affordable for a common man. In this regard, technology innovations should be exploited to cater to the services of poor and need with respect to healthcare. People living in cities gain access to healthcare units provided they have money to be spent or they have insurance coverage. What about rural people where people cannot afford costly medical procedures? This is the question that needs answer with technology driven systems. Unless technologies help poor and need, it is of less use. This thought has its impact on the researchers and academia to investigate the recent advancements in the computing industry. The whole idea is based on the helping people who live in villages (remote places). This idea paved way for efforts in realizing remote health monitoring. This thought was unimaginable number of years back. However, with cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies that are based on distributed computing technologies, there is probability of realizing remote heath monitoring systems. IoT technology has ability to combine the physical and digital world. For instance, a human being is physical in nature and a mobile device is digital in nature. These two are combined seamlessly with IoT technology. This is realized with technologies like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), sensing technologies and sensors that are embedded in wearable devices, telecommunications, Internet and other connected devices that are known as IoT devices. On the other hand, cloud computing with its services could provide storage and computing features on demand with availability, scalability and fault tolerance. Therefore, both cloud computing and IoT are essential for remote health monitoring applications. In addition to this cloud computing provides distributed programming frameworks like Hadoop for storing and managing data. From the literature, it is understood that the existing integration of IoT and cloud to healthcare units has limitations in empirical utility.
