Facilitating multi-device usage in mhealth

Today, it is a common phenomenon for physicians to own multiple mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets in order to seamlessly access the Electronic Health Record (EHR). But, the over reliance on wireless communication channels by mobile devices limits the user expectation since consistent connectivity cannot be guaranteed due to the intermittent connectivity losses in mobile ecosystems. What is even challenging is the presence of the CAP theorem which states that though the following three properties are desired in a distributed environment: consistency, availability, and partition tolerance, only two of the properties can be guaranteed simultaneously. In this paper, we deployed a reliable mHealth architecture that enables healthcare practitioners to employ their multimobile devices to access the EHR. We proposed a middleware platform that synchronizes the medical data on the multi-devices of a single user with careful consideration to the CAP theorem. The architecture is based on mainstream technologies such as: the publish/subscribe technique for real-time data access, medical data encryption for security, and mobile-side caching.