Towards an architecture for mobile healthcare

Abstract

The growing costs of healthcare necessitate innovate means of healthcare delivery. We propose the concept of the tetherless patient, an augmentation of current healthcare delivery for a large and potentially growing class of conditions and diseases that allows continuous monitoring of patients beyond the confines of traditional points of care. To address the multifaceted challenges of supporting this paradigm, this paper focuses on a context-aware, mobile architecture that considers the entire path from sensor to clinician. It presents a formal mathematical model of the architecture, discusses our experience implementing it on a set of Android smartphones, and demonstrates feasibility in supporting context-aware applications.