Mobile Medical Data Synchronization on Cloud-Powered Middleware Platform

Abstract

Our research focuses on supporting patients (persons with mild hemophilia) to self-manage injuries in cases of minor incidents. This involves bi-directional exchanges of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) between patients and the care facility. However, mobile devices rely on wireless communication channels (e.g., Wi-Fi, 3.5/4G, etc.) to transmit data and these channels can experience sporadic disconnections due to bandwidth fluctuations and user mobility. As a result, the collected medical data may not be transmitted back to the Health Information system (HIS) in soft-real time. Further, when new updates are submitted by the patients who are disconnected (remote and offline), synchronization can fail; leading to decision-making based on outdated or incomplete information. In this work, we focus on how to ensure efficient synchronization of the EHR in unreliable mobile environments. This work took advantage of the ubiquitous nature of mobile cloud computing and proposes a middleware, which facilitates efficient process of medical data synchronization, and with minimal latency. The work details state-of-the-art architecture of the cloud-based middleware that is built and tested for real-world use following four methodologies namely: reflective, tuple space, context-awareness, and event-based.