A Crowd Sourced Pharmacovigilance Approach Using SMS-based Asymmetric Encryption

With the explosive international growth in mobile phone adoption, there is an increasing number of text message-based applications providing mission-critical services to mobile phone owners. With such an unexpected leap in the mobile subscriber base, questions have arisen over the reliability of Short Message Service (SMS) as a communication channel in regions of high mobile teledensity growth. This paper provides insight on two points - the architecture of new SMS-based services and an examination of SMS reliability in low resource environments. This is achieved by providing research results detailing the design and implementation of a crowd sourced mobile-based authentication service using asymmetric encryption and data from an in-field view of the reliability of SMS messages using the SMS product authentication service described. A new Mobile Product Authentication (MPA) platform has been designed and implemented using cloud-based distributed computing (server virtualization) and a mobile network reliability server has been built to emulate a quad-SIM cell phone with 2 GB of RAM, 200 GB storage and 2.5 GHz dual-core processing power. To evaluate network throughput, response time and fault-tolerance, time-stamped SMS messages are sent from the network reliability server to the MPA platform on a round-trip flight through Nigeria's largest mobile telecommunications company over varying time periods and network conditions.