An open source private cloud solution for rural healthcare

Abstract

One of the major challenges in developing countries like India is to make health care accessible in rural areas. Seventy percent of rural areas in India lack hospitals, physicians, and medical care. With the growth of the Internet, several healthcare portals are now available to provide appropriate solutions to common problems. However, information technology specifically computer adoption in rural areas is very low. But there is huge growth in the mobile phone usage even in rural India. Therefore utilization of mobile devices by rural healthcare applications could be an excellent solution for the country's needs of improved healthcare. An application which uses Cloud computing and mobile phones has been presented here. This is built using Eucalyptus, an open source cloud computing framework. In the next stage, we have planned to deploy the open source hospital management software Care2X application on the private cloud. © 2011 IEEE.