Mobile health services for smart cities

Abstract

Smart city utilizes information and communication technologies to provide comfortable living to its residents. Smart cities aim to improve the quality of healthcare services rendered to the patients, either through remote consultation or continuous monitoring of physiological data. Patient consultation or monitoring involves both communication and transmission of medical data between the doctor and the patient. Transfer of medical data is especially challenging since it is highly dynamic and contains valuable diagnostic information. Any alterations caused to the data, due to network operating conditions will produce potentially disastrous consequences in terms of patient diagnosis. So, medical data must always be transmitted on a network that provides good Quality of Service (QoS). In this context, a Patient Data Transfer (PDT) algorithm is proposed to identify the best network for medical data transfer in smart cities. The performance of the algorithm is tested for various medical traffic classes.