Near real-time medical data dissemination in m-health

The health sector is one of the primary beneficiaries of the smartphone and tablet boom. These devices are employed by the healthcare professionals to facilitate varying forms of healthcare delivery known as m-Health. But more specifically, these devices are used as medical data consumption nodes. However, mobile devices primarily communicate over wireless mediums and this leads to undesired communication latency in large mobile distributed systems due to the intermittent loss in connectivity. Since m-Health is a mission critical information system, this paper proposes a novel events-oriented mobile cloud computing framework that facilitates near real-time data propagation. The medical records are modeled as events which are disseminated to the healthcare professionals following the publish/subscribe technique. The WebSocket connection is also put forward ahead of the asynchronous polling technique in order to minimize latency. The evaluation of the architecture shows that the healthcare professionals are able to send medical data in a lowlatency fashion compared to other existing techniques such as the HTTP polling and long-polling techniques.