An efficient approach towards enhancing the performance of m-health using sensor networks and cloud technologies

Abstract

Mobile health technology has great prospective to increase healthcare quality, expand access to services, reduce costs, and improve personal wellness and public health. The online m-health monitoring and control is one of most the promising areas for mobile computing technologies. The online health management and control by using medical sensors, environmental sensors, clouds, Internet of Things (IoT), and fuzzy logic based approaches for establishing unbreakable and endless communication between medical professionals and patients is the need of current hospitals. Wireless Medical Sensor Networks and Radio Frequency Identification have been widely adopted in both the medical and healthcare industry. However, mobile health monitoring systems also raise significant privacy and security challenges. The early day’s experimentation outcomes have recommended a strong potential for using wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to which can efficiently use low-cost medical sensors and environmental sensors for improving the quality of online patient diagnosis and health monitoring in the hospitals. It is tremendously desirable to merge ubiquitous computing with m-health system and use wireless medical sensors & smart phones to observe the wellness of chronic patients continuously. Here, the monitoring of patients can be either with the consent of patients or with the consent patient’s family members. The patients can be monitored and their activities can be tracked using wearable or non-wearable sensors. The most modern advancements in WSN technologies have created a new pitch of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) whose integration with m-health system is creating a new dimension of patient friendly online health monitoring, advice and control system. Since, the physiological data obtained from medical sensors of a patient are very receptive. Therefore, maintaining the confidentiality of patient’ data is a highly responsible task. Hence, the security is an essential research concern of m-health applications especially for the cases where patients have upsetting diseases. The healthcare services have been further expanded to become mobile healthcare service with the help of global mobile communication systems and broad radio frequency services. In this research work, the author has tried to raise and discuss the issues related to mobile health systems and try to find suitable solutions for these problems using sensors, clouds, Internet of Things (IoT) and soft computing technologies. In the proposed m-health system a central cloud server enabled with IoT and fuzzy sets based technologies is being used to read medical sensors data of patients. This obtained data will further be transmitted to mobile applications for sending alert SMS (Short Message Service) on a regular interval in case of emergency situations.