Synchronization of Medical Data in a Mobile Provisioning Environment: mHealth Use Case

Abstract

The use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, as well as other Information and Communications Technology (ICT) tools, to facilitate healthcare delivery in the medical landscape, known as mHealth, has risen phenomenally. In most mHealth systems, mobile devices are employed as services and health information client consumers. Meaning, physicians use these devices to access the Electronic Health Record (EHR) which resides on back-end platforms. However, in a research collaboration with the Geriatrics Ward of the City Hospital in Saskatoon, Canada, we have identified a huge potential for facilitating the mobile device as a medical data hosting node. Our approach is beneficial for collecting the EHR remotely and pushing it to the Health Information System (HIS). For instance, Geriatrics’ patients who are home can be attended to outside of the health facility since their medical data is being retrieved from or pushed to the HIS remotely. However, mobile devices communicate over wireless mediums, which can experience intermittent loss of connectivity. It is also possible to visit the patient’s home, and there not be any connectivity. These situations can cause an inconsistency between the data that is on the physician’s mobile device and the data on the HIS. Our work therefore proposes a cloud-powered middleware architecture that facilitates the synchronization of the data between the mobile devices and the HIS in soft real-time. The middleware employs the propagation of deltas and timestamp to determine which of the data is the newest update in any direction and ensures that all the operations are in sync. The evaluation of our proposed system shows minimal latency. KeywordsREST; Mobile Cloud Computing; Middleware; Healthcare Information Systems; Resources State Change; Mobile Hosting/Provisioning