Pervasive Personal Healthcare Service Designed as Mobile Social Network

Abstract

A global phenomenon of population ageing and an increasing number of patients with chronic diseases place substantial additional pressure on healthcare systems. A possible solution for this problem is a new emerging sort of pervasive personal healthcare service that is focused on the patient and allows the patient to be actively involved in his or her own health care. In this paper, we propose the architecture of the pervasive personal healthcare service which is based on the existing technologies available to almost everyone. Along with the conventional request-response synchronous communication, the proposed system features asynchronous communication based on publish-subscribe-notify model. In order to perform asynchronous communication, a web application server is integrated with the Google Cloud Messaging service. The communication between mobile device and servers is carried out through the available Wi-Fi or mobile networks, whereas Bluetooth protocol is conventional for Body Sensor Networks consisting of wearable sensor devices. We also present a mobile application which has been developed with use-case driven approach for both patients and medical personnel. The introduced application has a form of a nonintrusive customized mobile social network. We explain usage scenarios that clarify the required functions and present conclusions based on the system test.