SOPHRA: A mobile web services hosting infrastructure in mHealth

The use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and other ICT tools to facilitate healthcare delivery in the medical landscape, known as mHealth, has witnessed a phenomenal rise recently. In most mHealth systems, mobile devices are employed as services and health information client consumers. Thus, healthcare professionals use these devices to consume services which are running on back-end platforms. However, in a research collaboration with the Geriatrics Ward of the City Hospital in Saskatoon, Canada, we have identified a huge potential in facilitating the mobile device as a service hosting node. Hence, we developed a physically distributed information infrastructure, called SOPHRA, which aids the healthcare professionals to securely access and share patients' medical information which are hosted on their mobile devices. Since mobile devices establish communication over wireless channels which can sometimes be unavailable, the proposed mobile hosting framework faces the challenge of reliable and real-time message propagation to the mobile participants. This paper presents the adopted methodologies employed in implementing SOPHRA to address the aforementioned challenges. A cloud-oriented middleware is implemented which enables the mobile participants to reliably communicate in soft real-time. Furthermore, the records of the patients are modeled as Web Services (WS) which aids medical information to be passed across the system components; and these WS are independently replicated on the middleware to ensure high information availability. Currently, SOPHRA supports both SOAP and RESTful Web Services protocols and facilitates information exchanges over Wi-Fi.