Integrating USB Smart Card with Flash Memory to Web based Medical Information Systems: Application for the pathology of cancer

This paper examines the application of USB smart cards with Flash memory in the development of distribute medical information systems. This research proposes a methodology for USB smart card with Flash memory. The pocket mobility and security features of smart cards make them an ideal medium for storing the critical medical records of individual. However, the lack of interoperability and support for distributed operation has limited the development and usage of USB smart cards in a networked environment. The process is strongly driven by the technological issue, which impose a very careful design on the logical and physical data structures in order to meet the constraints the smart card architecture introduces, and to provide satisfactory performance. It highlights the benefits of combining the World Wide Web and USB smart card technologies to support the development of highly robust and secured health information system, while leveraging on the rich benefits of the web technology. In particular, we describe an approach of using the Web USB Smart card service model as a common interface to communicate and access the medical records residing in a smart card that seamlessly integrate to existing web infrastructure. The initial implementation of the framework and development ofa case example of a web based medical information site have demonstrated the feasibility of concept of the Web USB Smart card. In this paper we present USB smart card technology, and then we introduce a USB smart card Flash memory. We take the pathology of cancer for the case study.