Mobile Technologies in Healthcare: Approaches and Architecture

With the continuous advancement of mobile technologies, sensing technologies and cloud computing, mobile technology services have unleashed immense opportunities in the field of healthcare. The motivation behind this paper is to focus on the existing mobile healthcare technologies and their impact on individual and community welfare. Sensing technologies and cloud computing are being increasingly used to enhance healthcare services and to reduce healthcare expenses. The evolving mobile healthcare technologies are confronting impediments regarding battery life, storage, bandwidth, security, scalability, reliability, and efficiency. In this paper, we present an overview of existing mobile healthcare applications and present a unified architecture for healthcare applications. In addition, we analyze the challenges of wireless sensor networks in the context of healthcare applications, and discuss future research directions of mobile healthcare technologies.