A Novel Cooperation Strategy for Mobile Health Applications

Mobile Health (m-Health) systems include the use of mobile devices and applications that interact with patients and caretakers. However, mobile devices have several constraints (such as, processor, energy, and storage resource limitations), affecting the quality of service and user experience. This paper proposes a novel cooperation strategy for m-Health services and applications. This contribution addresses two related limitations to m-Health applications with service-oriented architectures, namely the network infrastructure and Internet connectivity dependency. It follows a reputation-based approach as an incentive method for cooperation, which includes a Web service to manage all the network cooperation. It is responsible for verifying the cooperation status of neighbor nodes and to provide relay nodes the required data in order to perform a full data request. A performance evaluation study in a real scenario is presented, using an available m-Health application, called SapoFit. For performance evaluation purposes, an analytical model is also considered in order to compare the obtained experiment results. It is clearly shown that referred dependencies are relevantly decreased, providing mobile nodes without Internet connectivity a free of charge and suitable alternative to access its remotely stored health information. It also improves the service delivery probability while increasing the overall network throughput.