Fundamental Issues in Mobile Healthcare Information Systems

Consistent growth in the mobile technology has led to many significant features that have improved the quality of services provided to people from all walks of life. While the need for a broader and more diverse range of available services is growing, the multifaceted and deep rooted challenges of the mobile technology such as security, privacy, efficiency, coherence, and resilience have to evolve. While most of the online businesses, social networking, financial transactions, personal record managements, and so forth are increasingly being done from mobile phones, it is important that an appropriate infrastructure capable of handling this data is in place to keep, handle, update, secure, and make it available when needed in accordance with national and international rules and regulations. The quality of life can be improved by automating a number of tasks that have a direct impact on day-to-day living. One prominent area of growing interest in this regard is the support of healthcare provision anywhere, anyhow, and at any time. Suitable information systems and the relevant network infrastructures are moving closer and closer together. There is the need to have security, privacy, efficiency, robustness, consistency, and availability at all times. In order to incorporate the said objectives, it is justified to advocate an information system that can operate on mobile devices to provide healthcare services, whereby the service layer and the data transportation layer are moving increasingly closer to each other. Healthcare systems are at the cusp of being revolutionized by advancements in technology, which when appropriately integrated into existing best practices can enable faster and safer cure, improved doctor-patient relationships, personalized treatments, and lower costs. Typically this can be measured and controlled bymonitoring theQuality of Experience (QoE). With rapid advances in computing and associated technologies, we are also seeing steady and seamless integration of communication, networking, hardware miniaturization, sensing, cryptography, and a range of algorithmic advances for smarter and increasingly personalized healthcare. At the forefront of challenges in emergent smarter healthcare systems the issues are how tomanagemassively growing amount of healthcare information and smart devices over a variety of technologies across different domains maintaining a guaranteed quality of service (QoS) at any time. In the realm of healthcare, while there are clear opportunities to leverage information management emanating from today’s computing technologies, additional challenges include providing information reliability, security, patient’s privacy, real-time criticality, information fusion, system sustainability, and social interaction, among others. Although research in the domain of informationmanagement analytics for smarter healthcare is attracting attention across disciplines, critical applications, new opportunities, challenges, models, and technologies are yet to be explored and investigated.