An IoT Cloud Model for Diabetes Home-Based Care: A Case Study for Perceived Future Feasibility

Recently, the care of chronic disease has become a worldwide challenge. Although the healthcare domain has begun to adopt new ICT technologies such as the Internet of Things and cloud computing, it is still in its initial phase. In this chapter, the authors conduct a small-scale two-step case study of diabetes care in Blekinge, Sweden. The first step is intended to acquire insight into the actual care situation to improve the original conceptual model. In the second step, we validate the feasibility of the improved model working in real healthcare. The results show that the Internet of Things and cloud computing is acceptable by both healthcare providers and recipients for home-based chronic diseases healthcare with little concerns of security and privacy in the future. In our hybrid cloud model, hospitals and primary healthcare centers could continue using their own exciting databases as private clouds. The best approach for home-based healthcare data is to collect it by connecting the different devices directly and storing and processing them in public clouds. To realize this model in the future, we suggest that a professional IT healthcare education team should be created to support both healthcare providers and recipients.