Mobile-Based Medical Data Accessibility in mHealth
Richard K. Lomotey, Ralph Deters · 2014
The medical domain is embracing mobile technology (mHealth) to enable healthcare professionals have ubiquitous access to the Electronic Health Records (EHR). This creates the need for supporting mobile users to access medical data remotely in real-time, especially in mission critical and decision making situations. However, supporting real-time access and services synchronization in highly distributed mobile environments can be challenging due to the presence of the following factors: 1) sporadic wireless disconnections, 2) fluctuating bandwidth, 3) variations in device features, and 4) battery life constraints. The mobility of the healthcare professionals also poses threats to privacy especially when personalized devices such as smartphones get into the wrong hands. In this work, we focus on the above highlighted challenges by proposing a middleware-oriented mobile cloud computing framework that facilitates near real-time data propagation in the mobile environment. Also, we explore privacy and security options for the accessibility of the medical data in a mobile environment based on provenance and data transformation. The privacy is enhanced through the implementation of policies which ensures that the requester of the medical record is the intended user. The evaluation of the system, called Med App, shows that medical data dissemination can be achieved efficiently and securely.