This article proposes a new framework for a Cloud-based eHealth platform concept focused on Cloud computing environments, since current and emerging approaches using digital clinical history increasingly demonstrate their potential in maintaining the quality of the benefits in medical care services, especially in computer-assisted clinical diagnosis within the field of infectious diseases and due to the worsening of chronic pathologies. Our objective is to evaluate and contrast the performance of the architectural patterns most commonly used for developing eHealth applications (i.e., service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices architecture (MSA)), using as reference the quantitative values obtained from the various performance tests and their ability to adapt to the required software attribute (i.e., versatile high-performance). Therefore, it was necessary to modify our platform to fit two architectural variants. As a follow-up to this activity, corresponding tests were performed that showed that the MSA variant functions better in terms of performance and response time compared to the SOA variant; however, it consumed significantly more bandwidth than SOA, and scalability in SOA is generally not possible or requires significant effort to be achieved. We conclude that the implementation of SOA and MSA depends on the nature and needs of organizations (e.g., performance or interoperability).

This article describes the design, development and implementation of a set of microservices based on an architecture that enables detection and assisted clinical diagnosis within the field of infectious diseases of elderly patients, via a telemonitoring system. The proposed system is designed to continuously update a medical database fed with vital signs from biosensor kits applied by nurses to elderly people on a daily basis. The database is hosted in the cloud and is managed by a flexible microservices software architecture. The computational paradigms of the edge and the cloud were used in the implementation of a hybrid cloud architecture in order to support versatile high-performance applications under the microservices pattern for the pre-diagnosis of infectious diseases in elderly patients. The results of an analysis of the usability of the equipment, the performance of the architecture and the service concept show that the proposed e-health system is feasible and innovative. The system components are also selected to give a cost-effective implementation for people living in disadvantaged areas. The proposed e-health system is also suitable for distributed computing, big data and NoSQL structures, thus allowing the immediate application of machine learning and AI algorithms to discover knowledge patterns from the overall population.

Currently, smart buildings generate large amounts of data due to the many devices and equipment available. Hence, buildings implement building management systems (BMSs), which monitor, control, manage and analyze each of these components. However, current BMSs are incapable of managing a massive amount of data (big data) and therefore cannot extract knowledge or make intelligent decisions in quasi real time. In addition, there are serious limitations to integrating BMSs with other services since they generally use proprietary software. In this sense, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that allows one to build distributed systems and provide functionalities such as services to end users or other types of services. Therefore, an SOA has the great advantage of allowing the expansion of the functionalities of BMSs. In fact, there are several studies that address SOAs for building management. However, we have not found any description or systematic analysis in the literature that allows the development of a versatile and interoperable SOA focused on the energy efficiency of buildings and that can integrate massive data analysis features. For these reasons, this study seeks to fill this knowledge gap and, more specifically, to identify and analyze the various software requirements proposed in the literature and the characteristics of big data that allow for improving the energy efficiency of buildings. To this end, we performed an in-depth review of the literature according to the methodology proposed by Kitchenham. As a result of this review, we provide researchers with a specific vision of the requirements and characteristics to consider for software development aimed at the energy efficiency of unique or historic buildings.

Background: treating infectious diseases in elderly individuals is difficult; patient referral to emergency services often occurs, since the elderly tend to arrive at consultations with advanced, serious symptoms. Aim: it was hypothesized that anticipating an infectious disease diagnosis by a few days could significantly improve a patient’s well-being and reduce the burden on emergency health system services. Methods: vital signs from residents were taken daily and transferred to a database in the cloud. Classifiers were used to recognize patterns in the spatial domain process of the collected data. Doctors reported their diagnoses when any disease presented. A flexible microservice architecture provided access and functionality to the system. Results: combining two different domains, health and technology, is not easy, but the results are encouraging. The classifiers reported good results; the system has been well accepted by medical personnel and is proving to be cost-effective and a good solution to service disadvantaged areas. In this context, this research found the importance of certain clinical variables in the identification of infectious diseases. Conclusions: this work explores how to apply mobile communications, cloud services, and machine learning technology, in order to provide efficient tools for medical staff in nursing homes. The scalable architecture can be extended to big data applications that may extract valuable knowledge patterns for medical research.

Forecasting the energy consumption of heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems is important for the energy efficiency and sustainability of buildings. In fact, conventional models present limitations in these systems due to their complexity and unpredictability. To overcome this, the long short-term memory-based model is employed in this work. Our objective is to develop and evaluate a model to forecast the daily energy consumption of heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems in buildings. For this purpose, we apply a comprehensive methodology that allows us to obtain a robust, generalizable, and reliable model by tuning different parameters. The results show that the proposed model achieves a significant improvement in the coefficient of variation of root mean square error of 9.5% compared to that proposed by international agencies. We conclude that these results provide an encouraging outlook for its implementation as an intelligent service for decision making, capable of overcoming the problems of other noise-sensitive models affected by data variations and disturbances without the need for expert knowledge in the domain.

A joint medical and computing research group has developed a full system to build a clinical database (DB) in the Cloud to extract knowledge for the speed diagnosis of infectious diseases. It is a significant step forward as traditionally the lack of data prevents the development of medical recommenders to anticipate the diagnosis. In addition, the steadily data update enables efficient telecare for individual patients, raising the satisfaction level of the patient and relatives. The usability of the system have been tested with satisfactory results.