Composition of the Electronic Health Record: Mobile Efficiency in mHealth
Richard K. Lomotey, Ralph Deters · 2013
Recently, there is growing research interest in the area of mHealth which aims at extending the Electronic Health Records (EHR) accessibility to the mobile node. This era facilitates real-time access to medical data which is also crucial for remote healthcare delivery. However, as reported in previous studies, 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. In this paper, we aim to enhance the medical data exchanges within the mHealth system efficiently through network adaptation. First, since the medical data is made of different web services (e.g., REST and SOAP), services composition mechanism is proposed that transforms all the web services to REST. Second, since the services processing can be intensive on the mobile, we proposed the process offloading to the cloud based on a policy that determines the availability of network bandwidth. The pilot testing of our work shows that the EHR can be accessed in real time and the system is also scalable.