Abstracts Category : Other

Mobile cloud healthcare systems using the concept of pointofcare

by Hazzaa Naif Alshareef

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in delivering/accessing healthcare services on mobile devices. An example of a health practice/application that is benefiting from the mobile evolution is mhealth, which is aimed at providing health services to mobile devices on the move. However, mobile devices have restricted computational and storage capacity, and run on batteries that have limited power. These limitations render mhealth unable to run the demanding tasks that may be required for accessing/providing health services. The mobile cloud has recently been proposed as a solution for dealing with some of the limitations of mobile devices, such as low storage and computing capacity. However, introducing this solution into the mhealth field is not straightforward, as the integration of this technology has specific limitations, such as disconnection issues and concerns over privacy and security. This thesis presents research work investigating the ability to introduce mobile cloud computing technology into the health field (e.g., mhealth) to increase the chances of survival in cases of emergencies. This work focuses on providing help to people in emergencies by allowing them to seek/access help via mobile devices reliably and confidently, as well as the ability to build a communication platform between people who require help and professionals who are trusted and qualified to provide it. The concept of pointofcare has been used here, which means providing as much medical support to the public as possible where and when it is needed. This thesis proposes a mobile cloud middleware solution that enhances connectivity aspects by allowing users to create/join a mobile adhoc network (MANET) to seek help in the case of emergencies. On the other side, the cloud can reach users who do not have a direct link to the cloud or an Internet connection. The most important advantage of combining a MANET and a mobile cloud is that management tasks such as IP allocation and split/merge operations are shifted to the cloud, which means resources are saved on the mobile side. In addition, two mobile cloud services were designed which have the aim of interacting with users to facilitate help to be provided swiftly in the case of emergencies. The system was deployed and tested on Amazon EC2 cloud and Androidbased mobile devices. Experimental results and the reference architecture show that the proposed middleware is feasible and meets predefined requirements, such as enhancing the robustness and reliability of the system.Advisors/Committee Members: Grigoras, Dan.