Ubiquitous computing approach for mobile health applications

• Autor(a) principal: Lopes, Ivo Miguel Charro de Matos
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/3769
• topic: Computação móvel - Cuidados de saúde; Saúde electrónica; Serviços de saúde - Tecnologias móveis; Cuidados de saúde - Monitorização electrónica; Cuidados de saúde - Serviços Web

The high penetration of mobile devices and networks globally implies that mobile technology could be used very effectively in the health field in order to compensate for the lack of resources problem, particularly in developing countries. With the proliferation of mobile technologies, mobile health (m-health) will play a vital role in the rapidly growing electronic health (e-health) area. The form of transparency between health and patients is a need to compensate for the lack of medical resources. E-health solutions, provides patients with mobile services to support and optimize their treatment based on the monitoring of certain physiological parameters. This category of e-health is called mobile health monitoring. Obesity is a big public health challenge and its prevention requires patients with healthy eating and physical activity awareness in their daily lives. It is estimated that over 50% of world population will be obese by 2025 if no action is taken otherwise. Therefore, obesity is rightly regarded by the World Health Organization as the global epidemic of the XXI century. In the European Union, including Portugal, the incidence and prevalence of either pre-obesity or obesity have been rising as an important public health problem. In Portugal, the current situation presents high prevalence of obesity and its incidence, morbidity and mortality is also increasing. Furthermore, people usually use mobile phone in their daily life. Then, it creates an opportunity to create a mobile solution for personal support to reduce obesity. This work proposes the creation of a mobile health (m-health) system for Android operating system using ubiquitous computing approaches. A solution, called SapoFitness, is proposed for a dietetic monitoring and assessment, and will be carried out with SAPO – Portugal Telecom. SapoFitness is customized per user to keep a daily personal health record (PHR) of his/her food intake and daily exercise. This PHR contains vital health information and will evaluate the nutritional state of the user. The system monitors the user and sends alerts/messages concerning his/her diet program taking into account also his/her physical activity. SapoFitness is a challenged mobile application that delivers the action to the user, anytime and anywhere, motivating him for a healthier life style. The system will use the Web Services architecture, which appears as a new model for distributed computing, represents the latest proposed solution for development and application integration. Web services come with a promise to definitely bring down the barrier of communication between heterogeneous platforms, revolutionizing the way people develop applications targeted for the Internet, transforming it into a software architecture, service-oriented. SapoFitness was evaluated in different mobile devices (Sony Ericsson x10 mini, HTC Magic, TMN a1 and Samsung Galaxy Tab), taking into different screens sizes. The system also was been evaluated and validated by SAPO team and it is ready for use.