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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The emergence of mobile health and Web-based services along with
new ubiquitous mechanisms are providing new methods to deliver services
that overcomes geographical and temporal barriers, delivering information
regardless place and time. With the proliferation of mobile devices, online
markets have been growing with many health applications, allowing users
to have access to health records, treatment plans, alerts and health goals
establishment (e.g., weight loss). This recent ubiquitous paradigm is much
possible due to Web Services capabilities and new data-interchange
notations, as well as the evolution of mobile software development kits.
However, m-health architectures that depend on wireless networks have
several constraints such as mobile devices battery, processor and memory
resources, as well as issues regarding network connectivity and
communication delays. Cooperation mechanisms have proven to be a
promising solution to approach these constraints.
In a typical cooperation strategy, information transmitted through
wireless channels is usually relayed through a relay node and/or a relay
station (i.e., a base station), using a packet forwarding cooperation model.
While some cooperation approaches aim multiple constraints, such as
bandwidth performance, wireless frequency management or localization
improvement, other approaches aim one specific network or limitation
inherent to mobile devices, such as battery power or processing power
issues. In this work a novel cooperation strategy for m-health services
following service oriented architectures is proposed in order to approach
two common drawbacks in mobile health systems: the Internet connectivity and infrastructure dependencies. A reputation-based model is used, where
a Web Service is responsible for nodes reputation management, as well as
for the access control. At the client-side (i.e., in the mobile device) four
software modules are used in order to manage and control the ubiquitous
cooperation process. The ultimate goal is to provide an alternative for
remote access, where mobile devices without Internet connectivity could
retrieve remotely stored health data through cooperation. Packet
forwarding should occur through short and low energy consuming
communications, specifically through Bluetooth interface. This results in a
free of charge alternative to cellular data network connections and
independent of WiFi access points.
Although the referred mechanisms aim any mobile health
application, this work was carried with SAPO – Portugal Telecom and for
test purposes a specific mobile health application, namely SapoFit, was
used. Cooperation mechanisms were created and integrated in SapoFit, and
a cooperative Web Service was built. A performance evaluation in a real
scenario with different mobile devices is performed and presented in this
work. The request and response message delays are measured, while
varying the number of uncooperative nodes, and verifying the required
time for each individual communication process. Furthermore, the memory
footprint of the mobile cooperation mechanisms is revealed.
Description
Keywords
Telemedicina M-saúde - Telemedicina U-saúde - Telemedicina Telemedicina - Cuidados de saúde Telemedicina - Cuidados de saúde - Comunicação