Middleware-Enabled Mobile Framework in mHealth

The recent advancement in mobile technology has established smartphones and tablet devices as the consumer device nodes to access the Electronic Health Records (EHR). Mobile devices further aid the healthcare professionals to access the EHR on the go and outside a centralized health facility. However, the over reliance on wireless communication mediums (e.g., Wi-FI, and 3.5G/4G) by mobile devices hampers the reliable flow of disseminating the EHR. For instance, there is no guarantee that the medical data from the main Health Information System (HIS) can be consumed on the mobile device of a healthcare professional when there is no connectivity. While a secure caching technique of the medical data on the mobile can be a solution to facilitate offline accessibility, the same technique can lead to challenges of data conflict. Specifically, when the cached data is updated in an offline mode and that information has to be synchronized with the HIS. We investigate efficient means of disseminating the EHR in unreliable networks. Our mobile architectural design consists of mobile nodes, a cloud-hosted middleware and the HIS. The proposal of the middleware is to enforce provenance, services composition, and reliable synchronization of the medical data for faster dissemination. The preliminary evaluations of the proposed approaches show high performance boost in terms of latency optimization and reliability.