An Android-enabled mobile framework for ensuring quality of life through patient-centric care

The drive to achieve excellence in healthcare delivery while containing costs, underlies the need for a new generation of applications which facilitate the realization of a patient-centric care model. Under this emerging care model healthcare delivery can be integrated across the continuum of services, from prevention to follow up, and care can be coordinated across all settings. With care moving out into the community, health systems require real-time information to deliver coordinated care to patients. The integration of leading-edge technologies, such as mobile technology, with Personal Health Records (PHRs) can meet this requirement by making comprehensive and unified health information available to authorized users at any point of care or decision making through familiar environments such as Google's Android. This paper presents a framework that provides ubiquitous access to patients' PHRs via Android-enabled mobile devices. Where possible health information access and management is performed in a transparent way, thus enabling healthcare professionals to devote more time on practicing medicine and patients to manage their own health with the least possible intervention. This depends heavily on the context, which is collected by both Android-specific core system services and special purpose software agents with the latter being also responsible for preserving PHR data privacy.