An Architecture for Cloud-Assisted Clinical Support System for Patient Monitoring and Disease Detection In Mobile Environments

Opportunities exist to improve healthcare delivery by extending to the domain of mobile healthcare the emerging clinical support system that facilitates patient monitoring and early disease detection. Current research focuses on hospitallevel patient monitoring using an automated clinical support system. A similar system can be adapted to support medical monitoring and remote care for mobile patients. Unlike the hospital environment where stationary computing infrastructures can be leveraged for the medical data acquisition, processing and storage, the mobile healthcare environment may rely solely on mobile devices, such as a smartphone, to acquire and process the medical data. Given that the mobile devices are constrained by energy, processing and storage capabilities, outsourcing some of the operations to the cloud is a plausible approach. Cloud-assisted clinical support system for mobile patients creates more opportunities for healthcare delivery, but there are attendant challenges that must be considered in the development of the system. This paper identifies these opportunities and the challenges that exist with the development of cloud-assisted clinical support system for patient monitoring and disease detection in mobile environments, and introduces an architecture for developing the system, with a proof of concept.