Arogyashree: A distributed file system for large scale internet-based telemedicine

Today, a typical telemedicine system involves a small set of hospitals providing remote healthcare services to a small section of the society using nodal centers, mobile health units, etc. However, the benefits of a telemedicine system increase with scale. One of the key requirements of such a large scale system is to allow large numbers of patient medical records, in the form of electronic files, to be efficiently stored and accessed from widely distributed locations. In this paper, we address the need for a distributed file system to manage patient data in large scale telemedicine systems. We use the resources of unreliable Internet edge nodes distributed among hospitals, labs, etc., to provide reliable file system services to patients and doctors. Besides building an Internet-based system that scales with the number of nodes and files, we also attempt to optimize record access times for doctors to provide timely responses.