RESTful dissemination of healthcare data in mobile digital ecosystem

Abstract

Mobile technology is playing a significant role in transforming the healthcare domain and enabling a new era of digital healthcare ecosystem. In healthcare, tablets are replacing the conventional paper-based way of tracking patient's record. These devices are not only used to collect user's inputs as events, they can perform various analytical computations and provide an instant output in order to meet investigator's need. As these tablets are interacting over wireless networks, the communication often suffers intermittent connection loss. This can prevent tablets from successfully propagating event data. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for disseminating events among mobile participants. Our architecture has two contributions - first, it addresses the challenge of Wi-Fi network while synchronizing data among tablets, and second, it develops a RESTful architecture assuming that only HTTP like protocol is used in event dissemination. Our framework adopts PInGO (Pain Information on the Go) application that has been developed in research collaboration with Bioinformatics Research Lab at University of Saskatchewan for Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) patients. Patient's inputs from the application were used in disseminating event data within the proposed framework.