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International Conference on Distributed Computing and Internet Technology

ICDCIT 2015: Distributed Computing and Internet Technology pp 114–133Cite as

Designing for Scalability and Trustworthiness in mHealth Systems

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8956))

Abstract

Mobile Healthcare (mHealth) systems use mobile smartphones and portable sensor kits to provide improved and affordable healthcare solutions to underserved communities or to individuals with reduced mobility who need regular monitoring. The architectural constraints of such systems provide a variety of computing challenges: the distributed nature of the system; mobility of the persons and devices involved; asynchrony in communication; security, integrity and authenticity of the data collected; and a plethora of administrative domains and the legacy of installed electronic health/medical systems.

The volume of data collected can be very large; together with the data, there is a large amount of metadata as well. We argue that certain metadata are essential for interpreting the data and assessing their quality. There is great variety in the kinds of medical data and metadata, the methods by which they are collected and administrative constraints on where they may be stored, which suggest the need for flexible distributed data repositories. There also are concerns about the veracity of the data, as well as interesting questions about who owns the data and who may access them.

We argue that traditional notions of relational databases, and security techniques such as access control and encryption of communications are inadequate. Instead, end-to-end systematic (from sensor to cloud) information flow techniques need to be applied for integrity and secrecy. These need to be adapted to work with the volume and diversity of data collected, and in a federated collection of administrative domains where data from different domains are subject to different information flow policies.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India

    Sanjiva Prasad

Authors
  1. Sanjiva Prasad
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Technology and Computer Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Homi Bhabha Road, Colaba, 400005, Mumbai, India

    Raja Natarajan

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, 781039, Guwahati, India

    Gautam Barua

  3. Department of Computer Science,, Berhampur University, 760007, Berhampur, Odisha, India

    Manas Ranjan Patra

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Prasad, S. (2015). Designing for Scalability and Trustworthiness in mHealth Systems. In: Natarajan, R., Barua, G., Patra, M.R. (eds) Distributed Computing and Internet Technology. ICDCIT 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8956. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14977-6_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14977-6_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-14976-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-14977-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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