Are mobile health cloud apps better than native?

Abstract

The global expansion of smartphones and tablets has created a huge industry of mobile applications. The cloud computing together with the mobile cloud apps, have been both gaining importance against native apps in the last years. This paper aims to perform a comparative study about the features of native and mobile cloud apps for health care. With that purpose, we have developed an academic and non-academic review of features, advantages and disadvantages of both types of apps and we have applied these features in three different health care scenarios: an Electronic Health Records (EHRs) administration app in a wide region, a heart rate monitoring app in a rural area, and a diabetes management app. It was concluded that although the mobile cloud apps offer significant advantages, which overcome the ones of native apps in some scenarios, there are other cases where native apps are the only solution. Hence, both types need to coexist for a while. As users seem to prefer native apps, a possible solution can be the use of hybrid apps, mobile cloud apps with a native container, since they get advantages from both types.