How to Realize Device Interoperability and Information Security in mHealth Applications

Abstract

More and more people suffer from chronic diseases such as the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). This leads to very high treatment costs every year, as such patients require a periodic screening of their condition. However, many of these checks can be performed at home by the patients themselves. This enables physicians to focus on actual emergencies. Modern smart devices such as Smartphones contribute to the success of these telemedical approaches. So-called mHealth apps combine the usability and versatility of Smartphones with the high accuracy and reliability of medical devices for home use. However, patients often face the problem of how to connect medical devices to their Smartphones (the device interoperability problem). Moreover, many patients reject mHealth apps due to the lack of control over their sensitive health data (the information security problem). In our work, we discuss the usage of the Privacy Management Platform (PMP) to solve these problems. So, we describe the structure of mHealth apps and present a real-world COPD application. From this application we derive relevant functions of an mHealth app, in which device interoperability or information security is an issue. We extend the PMP in order to provide support for these recurring functions. Finally, we evaluate the utility of these PMP extensions based on the real-world mHealth app.