Smart data synchronization in m-Health monitoring applications

Abstract

Nowadays, mobile applications/devices have become the trends, especially, when they were gradually shifted from basic communication services to supporting more sophisticated service provisioning. Mobile applications are usually very light, are nowadays likely to be often connected to the Internet, and can be used quite easily. However, these applications exhibit some challenges related to limited resources they have access to, including limited processing power, memory, storage size, battery power, and intermittent network connection. In fact, these considerations have to be taken seriously into consideration when developing mobile applications especially if those applications will be used for critical services, for example, to collect and report vital health data over a long period of time. In this paper, we study the use of mobile applications for monitoring patient's vital. Mobile devices, through an application, are connected to body-strapped biosensors to collect and synchronize these parameters with information systems. This synchronization should be done in such a way that the cost of synchronization is kept low and urgent readings are delivered as soon as possible. To optimize the synchronization process and reduce its cost, we propose and validate cost-oriented algorithms. A case study is developed to illustrate the applicability and effectiveness of our innovative techniques in making continuous monitoring an efficient process.