Enabling Community Health Care with

Microservices
Richard Hill, Dharmendra Shadija and Mo Rezai
Summary

• Health care and digital services

• Issues for digital health care
• Community care case study
• Intelligent Community Alarm 2.0
– IoT
– Edge analytics
– Microservices
• Lessons learned
• Conclusions
Issues for digital health care

• Complexity management
– Chasing the elusive ‘integration’ of myriad health systems
– Simplification of cyber security concerns, privacy
• Automation
– Coping with the volume; fast data events, alarm conditions
– Reassurance that routine privacy concerns are being dealt with
– Delegating detection duties
• Visualisation
– What is happening where
– Revealing insight
– What next
• These are generic issues for most industries
Data processing scenarios

Scenario Function Storage Compute Network

Past Learn from Large Intensive but Low demand
historical data infrequent
Present Understand data Small Intensive. Real- Demanding.
in relation to time data at high High data
current context velocity transfer rates
Future Predict, forecast Medium Intensive but Low demand
to large infrequent
Case study – community health care

• Inspired by similar work in digital manufacturing

• Health care services are becoming digitised
• Large portion of activities are logistics and coordination
• Reactive care is practiced
• Pro-active care is managed by human agents (typically
combination of health care professionals and informal
carers)
• System needs rapid elasticity
– Requirements are emerging and must scale
Health care overview
Emergency care
Daily care
Microservices for scalability

Microservice Task
Individual care 1. Create ICP.
plan 2. Maintain ICP.
3. Record outcome of needs assessment.
4. Update record of care received.
5. Analytics on care received.
Care provider 1. Update care plan.
2. Deliver to care plan.
Payment 1. Manage payments for provider.
processing 2. Manage payments across multiple providers.
Feedback Functionality for feedback from care recipient.
InCA 2
Intelligent Community Alarm
Analytics at the edge
Cameras, sensor networks
Edge architecture
INN - network node that enables
data packets to be transported
without performing any
processing upon the message
content e.g router, switch, hub.

MONITOR can be used to visualise data,

as well as providing a means of input to
interact with system parameters. For
instance, we might modify the analysis
criteria of an edge node component in
response to care requirements change.
 Sensor data processing
Simple sensor network producing
temperature, light, motion, colour, noise,
vibration, voltage, humidity, etc., data. Local
compute (FPGA) dumps irrelevant data.

62%
reduction
in
message
EDGE node Workflow rules filter volume
processes incoming data that is of relative to
data streams e.g., importance and INN path.
object tracking, forwards to cloud for 55%
pattern detection, subsequent reduction
synthesis of multiple processing. in
sensor inputs. bandwidth.

MONITOR: analytics
performed in-transit
 Image data processing

70%
reduction
in message
Workflow rules filter
volume
data that is of
relative to
EDGE: image importance and
INN path.
segmentation,object forwards to cloud for
subsequent processing. 56%
detection, Machine
reduction
Image captured from Learning
in
home environment. bandwidth.
Local compute
(FPGA) filters
anomalies and
performs data
MONITOR: analytics
reduction
performed in-transit
Cloud processing volume

No. of messages

Analytics completed
by EDGE node
Different sensor load conditions

1 camera,
4 sensors Mbps

1 camera,
1 sensor 1 camera,
8 sensors
Lessons from case study

• Community care is complex, variable demand

– Suited to microservice architecture
• Used edge analytics platform to capture knowledge
locally
– Simulation indicates reduced demand upon:
• Network bandwidth; storage; compute
• Edge architecture also assists privacy concerns
– Sensitive analytics performed within residence
• Building storyboards for analytics scenarios
– What visualisations are useful?
Conclusions

• We need bottom-up answers to enhance quality of care

– Descriptive, top-down statistics provide answers that are too
generic
• We can use health care information earlier
– Dispel myths through analysis; automate and recalculate
• We have the data already
– Sensors, event logs
– By sharing analytics data, can accelerate knowledge
– Horizontal integration of process data services
Conclusions - 2

• Methods have broad applicability

– Any measure that requires resourcing and a projection (not
restricted to digital health care)
– Underlying mathematics is common to most domain problems
• We can visualise multiple scenarios faster
– Exploit institutional intelligence from a secure perspective
– Strategic agility for IP security
– Proactive protection against emerging threats to care quality
• Automation and local compute are key enablers
Further work

• Granularity of microservices affects performance

– Basic assumption is that a microservice is self-contained
– Finer-grained MS: more communication
– Coarser-grained MS: less flexibility
• LoraWAN protocol not yet optimised for community care
scenario
– How do we exploit the gateway better
– Dynamic allocation of analytics workload across connected
nodes
Developments with local authority

• Combining local edge analytics with regional health

analytics on encrypted process data
• Peer-to-Peer IoT infrastructure with Blockchain
– Using distributed ledgers to authenticate edge node transactions
– Protecting records against manipulation
– Sharing process data with healthcare professionals