Context-Awareness in Mobile Cloud Computing: Healthcare

Cik Ku Haroswati Che Ku Yahaya1, Wan Haslina Hassan

2

Malaysia-Japan International Institute of Technology, Universiti Technologi Malaysia, Malaysia 1haroswati@gmail.com ,

2wanhaslina@ic.utm.my

ABSTRACT

Rapid changes in mobile cloud computing

tremendously affect the telecommunication, education

and healthcare industries and also business

perspectives. Nowadays, advanced information and

communication technology enhanced healthcare

sector to improved medical services at reduced cost.

However, issues related to security, privacy, quality

of services and mobility and viability need to be

solved before mobile cloud computing can be adopted

in the healthcare industry. Mobile healthcare (m-

Healthcare) is one of the latest technologies in the

healthcare industry which enable the industry players

to collaborate each other’s especially in sharing the

patience’s medical reports and histories. M-

Healthcare offer real-time monitoring and provide

rapid diagnosis of health condition. User’s context

such as location, identities and etc which are

collected by active sensor is important element in M-

Healthcare. This paper conducts a study pertaining to

mobile cloud healthcare, mobile healthcare and

comparisons between the variety of applications and

architecture developed/proposed by researchers.

KEYWORKS

Mobile cloud, healthcare, context-awareness, mobile

healthcare architecture, mobile healthcare

applications.

1 INTRODUCTION

Cloud computing change the way IT resources are

utilized and consumed and give a lot of benefits

to public sectors and government entities. Cloud

computing can be defined on-demand resources

when ever needed, released when no longer

required and billed only when used. NIST defined

Cloud Computing as follows [1]:

‘‘Model for enabling convenient, on-demand

network access to a shared pool of configurable

computing resources (networks, servers, storage,

applications, services) that can be rapidly

provisioned and released with minimal

management effort or service provider

interaction.’’

Latest advances in mobile communication

networks and increasing penetration of

Smartphone are transform the mobile internet and

users with rich mobile experience. However, the

limitation of memory storage, unable to process

heavy algorithm, battery life and bandwidth are

the biggest problems[2]. 4G and long-term

evolution (LTE) wireless networks provide

mobile devices with access to integrated

communication standards and low transmission

cost with rich multimedia support[3]. According

to[4], mobile computing has four constraints:

Mobile elements are resources-poor

relative to static elements

Mobility is inherently hazardous

Mobile connectivity is highly variable in

performance and reliability

Mobile elements rely on finite energy

resources.

Currently each hospitals developed their in house

system to manage their daily operations The

systems do not link each other’s resulting the

patients need to re-register their personal detail

each time they visit to deference hospitals In

Malaysia, some hospitals still using manual

healthcare system (paper-based) even though they

have invested in the healthcare technology.

Doctors record treatment detail and drug

manually, making it difficult to access a patient’s

history and determine the appropriate treatment.

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How context-awareness relevant to mobile cloud

computing? User’s mobility will create the

situation where user’s context such as the

location, people and objects around her is more

dynamic. Mobile cloud gives users facilities that

they can access information services anytime and

wherever they are and able to overcome the

limitation of mobile devices such as processing

power and battery consumption.

2 BACKGROUD

2.1 Mobile Cloud Computing

According to Wikipedia[5], Mobile Cloud

Computing (MCC) is distributed computing

paradigm comprises of three heterogeneous

domains of mobile computing, cloud computing,

and wireless networks.

In MCC, there are four types of cloud-based

resources, namely distant immobile clouds,

proximate immobile computing entities,

proximate mobile computing entities, and hybrid

(combination of the other three model) Giant

clouds such as Amazon EC2 are in the distant

immobile groups whereas cloudlet or surrogates

are member of proximate immobile computing

entities . Smart phones, tablets, handheld devices,

and wearable computing devices are part of the

third group of cloud-based resources which is

proximate mobile computing entities.

Figure 1 Architecture of Mobile Cloud Computing [9]

Applications are run on a remote server and then

sent to the user. Because of the advanced

improvement in mobile browsers thanks to Apple,

Google, Microsoft and Research in Motion,

nearly every mobile should have a suitable

browser. This means developers will have a much

wider market and they can bypass the restrictions

created by mobile operating systems.

Mobile cloud computing gives new company

chances for mobile network providers. Several

operators such as Vodafone, Orange and Verizon

have started to offer cloud computing services for

companies.

2.2 Context-Awareness

Many scholars define the context-awareness

based on their perspectives. Schilit et al.

mentioned that context-awareness initially

referred to as location, identities of nearby people,

objects to these objects[6]. Dey[7] has same

understanding where context is any information

considered relevant to interaction between a user

and an application, including the user and the

application themselves. These parameters may be

dynamic and may change during the execution[8].

Besides that, context-awareness also be defined

as a set of environment states and settings that

either determines an application’s behaviour or in

which application event occur and is interesting

to the user and as an intrinsic characteristic of

intelligent environment[9][10].

Context-aware computing was first discussed by

Olivette Active Badge work in 1992[11] and

followed by Schilit and Theimer[6] in 1994 that

context-awareness computing is “adapt according

to its location of use, the collection of nearby

people and objects as well as changes to those

objects over time”.

The use of context in mobile devices is get

considerable attention in various fields of

research including mobile computing, wearable

computing, augmented reality and the collection

of ubiquitous computing.

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3 RELATED WORKS

Applications in mobile cloud healthcare have

been discussed and presented in the following.

3.1 Cloud Healthcare Application & Mobile

Cloud Healthcare Application

All the application is based on the semi-auto

system. As shown in Figure 2, staff member

collect and record all the information using paper

based. Information treatment and drug precription

key-in in the healthcare system periodically.

Problems raised due to manual process and prone

to human errors and delay in availability of

patients data.

Figure 2. Healthcare Semi-Auto System. [4]

[12]Proposed to attach a sensor to medical

equipments to automate the process and make the

patient’s information available in the cloud.

Figure 3 show the sensor attached to the medical

equipment to collect and transmit patient’s

information thro wireless network. Eliminate the

manual process and data in the cloud allow

medical staff access information real-time and

reduced cost.

According to [13], they proposed integration

network module with existing system that

connected within the hospitals. The proposed

based on cloud computing so the information

sharing and high-end processing is available in

the "cloud".

Figure 3. Cloud Healthcare solution for patient’s data

collection [5]

The integration module via virtual private

network (VPN) and public internet access.

Therefore, they reduce the risk of security and

privacy. There are problems with traditional

Hospital Information System (HIS):

1. Lack of uniform standards for data-

sharing

2. High cost for independent construction

3. Difficult to Management, Upgrades and

Maintenance

Doang and Liefeng [14] proposed a Mobile Cloud

for Assistive Healthcare (MoCAsH) that deploys

intelligent mobile agents, context-awareness

middleware and collaborative protocol in their

architecture.

Figure 4. Architecture for Mobile Cloud for Assistive

Healthcare (MoCAsH) [7]

Data collected by the sensor are analyzed,

processed by the intelligent context-aware

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middleware. For examples, body temperature,

pulse, motion and time. This model addressed in

security and privacy issues also quality of service

and energy consumption.

According to [15], they proposed the architecture

that others architecture fails to provide. Figure 5

show the enhancement which prevented from

running the complex and massive algorithms.

Figure 5. Mobile Cloud Architecture [8]

The advantages of the proposed architecture are

preventing others component affected if one

component failed. This is due to loose coupling

connected among the components.

[3]developed a prototype of the SparkMed

framework to evaluate a radiological workflow

simulation. The framework integrates techniques

from multimedia streaming, rich internet

application (RIA) and remote procedure call

(RPC). Techniques include RPC framework such

as CORBA, semantic Ontology, software agents

and others form of wrapper generation.

This architecture still has limitation in term of

format acceptability, Quality of Service (QoS),

and data synchronization.

Figure 6. SparkMed Architecture [3]

Figure 7. Intelligent Hospital Information System

integrated with Intelligent Cloud Computing

Our proposed model is scenario based act based

on the following conditions:

1. Intelligent Cloud Computing: user’s

behavior information collected

periodically and it forecasts and prepares

contents by analyzed the collection of

information. Information contents can be

collected from patient’s Smartphone and

wearable devices and get the feedback and

personalized services made by server

based on patient’s status and need.

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2. All the analyzed data can be transferred,

viewed to the respective clinicians using

ubiquitous devices (Smartphone, laptop

and other portable devices). Observation,

consultations and treatment can be done

anytime, anywhere without barriers of

connectivity, availability and accesses

ability to the patient’s information.

3. Intelligent Hospital Information System

(IHIS) has a centralized information

system stored and accessible by all

departments in the hospital. Intelligent

sensor attached with health equipments.

Patient

Apart from that, there are several challenges

facing by researches in cloud healthcare, mobile

cloud healthcare and mobile healthcare. The

challenges are as following:

1. Information system fragmented and

incompatible with others departments

2. Low propensity to adopt ICT among

healthcare professional.

3. Rural-urban discrepancies.

4. High cost for independent construction.

5. Lack of a centralized repository or

common standard for most healthcare

data.

6. The limited scope of access to data in

proprietary hospital infrastructure systems

7. Security and privacy issues

8. Interoperability & availability

heterogonous resources.

9. Healthcare cost increase due to aging

societies.

10. Data quality.

4. CONCLUSION

Mobile cloud computing technology opened up

enemorous opportunities to improve healthcare

sector and change the community lifestyle. Our

model fulfills the requirements of professional

healthcare. In future, we will focus more detail in

technical aspects of this model and develop

prototype to test the intelligence, effectively and

accuracy of the system. Hopefully this model can

benefit to the healthcare sector, government,

society and others fields related to data sharing of

critical information.

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