A scalable database for a remote patient monitoring system

Abstract: Today one of the fast growing social services is the ability for doctors to monitor patients in their residences. The proposed highly scalable database system is designed to support a Remote Patient Monitoring system (RPMS). In an RPMS, a wide range of applications are enabled by collecting health related measurement results from a number of medical devices in the patient’s home, parsing and formatting these results, and transmitting them from the patient’s home to specific data stores. Subsequently, another set of applications will communicate with these data stores to provide clinicians with the ability to observe, examine, and analyze these health related measurements in (near) real-time. Because of the rapid expansion in the number of patients utilizing RPMS, it is becoming a challenge to store, manage, and process the very large number of health related measurements that are being collected. The primary reason for this problem is that most RPMSs are built on top of traditional relational databases, which are inefficient when dealing with this very large amount of data (often called “big data”). This thesis project analyzes scalable data management to support RPMSs, introduces a new set of open-source technologies that efficiently store and manage any amount of data which might be used in conjunction with such a scalable RPMS based upon HBase, implements these technologies, and as a proof of concept, compares the prototype data management system with the performance of a traditional relational database (specifically MySQL). This comparison considers both a single node and a multi node cluster. The comparison evaluates several critical parameters, including performance, scalability, and load balancing (in the case of multiple nodes). The amount of data used for testing input/output (read/write) and data statistics performance is 1, 10, 50, 100, and 250 GB. The thesis presents several ways of dealing with large amounts of data and develops & evaluates a highly scalable database that could be used with a RPMS. Several software suites were used to compare both relational and non-relational systems and these results are used to evaluate the performance of the prototype of the proposed RPMS. The results of benchmarking show that MySQL is better than HBase in terms of read performance, while HBase is better in terms of write performance. Which of these types of databases should be used to implement a RPMS is a function of the expected ratio of reads and writes. Learning this ratio should be the subject of a future thesis project.