An Android-Enabled Mobile Framework for Ubiquitous Access to Cloud Emergency Medical Services

Recently, there has been a remarkable upsurge in activity surrounding the adoption of Personal Health Records (PHRs). Since PHRs contain global patient information and not certain pieces collected by individual healthcare providers, they can be used as basic infrastructures for building and operating several important systems for both healthcare and the tax payers. Emergency medical systems (EMS) are among the most crucial ones as they involve a variety of activities which are performed from the time of a call to an ambulance service till the time of patient´s discharge from the emergency department of a hospital and are closely interrelated so that collaboration and coordination becomes a vital issue for patients and for emergency healthcare service performance. The integration of leading-edge technologies, such as cloud-based services and mobile technology, with Personal Health Records (PHRs) can prove important in emergency care delivery as it can facilitate authorized access to comprehensive and unified health information at any point of care or decision making through familiar environments such as Google´s Android. This paper is concerned with the development of a PHR-based EMS in a cloud computing environment. The proposed EMS is accessible by Android-enabled mobile devices and incorporates a customized asynchronous notification feature whereby caregivers are notified on critical data updates in a way that efficient utilization of mobile device resources is achieved. This feature draws upon a cloud-based push messaging mechanism, namely Google Cloud Messaging, a lightweight mechanism which enables servers to communicate asynchronously with mobile applications running on Android Operating System.