Abstract:

Microservice architecture has already proved to bring important benefits to the solutions based on it; among the most relevant are the scalability, fault tolerance, loose coupling or a decentralized data management. All these features are of main importance for digital healthcare solutions which need a high degree of flexibility for keeping up with the great variety of medical assistance domains, or independence in exploitation. Remote Patient Monitoring applications have become more and more implemented for decreasing the burden put on the medical systems by the ageing population, COVID-19 pandemic, growing demands for proactive and preventive healthcare service or patients’ empowerment. The use of microservice architecture for designing Remote Patient Monitoring applications is also sustained by the link with the current and emerging technologies (like Internet of Things, cloud/fog/edge computing, artificial intelligence) that are comprised in these applications. Data in digital healthcare solutions is of extremely importance due to its sensitive feature; therefore, a special attention is put on its management to ensure its accuracy, privacy or security. This paper aims to present the opportunities of using the microservice architecture for Remote Patient Monitoring applications, highlighting the benefits brought to health data management. In that context, the main design issues of microservice architecture are presented, and the advantages of the associated data management are brought up not only from theoretically point of view, but also in a practical illustration through an example of a Remote Patient Monitoring application, namely RO-SmartAgeing system, an ongoing application developed inside a current research project.