Intensive Care Cloud: Exploiting cloud infrastructures for near real-time vital sign analysis in intensive care medicine

This paper introduces a novel, open architecture cloud oriented framework named Intensive Care Cloud, ICCloud. ICCloud main objective is to provide a) a common repository to store anonymized vital sign parameters retrieved from intensive care bedside medical devices and b) exploit massive computational resources to analyze vital sign parameters. ICCloud uses a simplified data model (cloud tables) to reduce the complexity of the deployment and the cost of usage of the infrastructure. These cloud tables are accessed only within the cloud infrastructure (cloud jobs) using only inbound network traffic. Pre-allocated working nodes (virtual machines used only for processing) are used to execute jobs implementing scoring functions or data analysis algorithms.