Mobile Cloud for Assistive Healthcare (MoCAsH)

Deploying state-of-the-art technologies is vital and inevitable in assistive healthcare to cope with emerging services such as remote monitoring, collaborative consultation, and electronic health record. Grid computing has succeeded somewhat in enabling the sharing of resources across organizations but has not been deployed widely due to its complex implementation and interface. Cloud computing overcomes this aspect by allowing simple and easy user access, coping with users´ dynamic and elastic demands, providing metered usage for its resources and hence is increasingly being adopted by individual users as well as enterprise users. The Cloud may just be the right technology for healthcare infrastructure. However, several serious issues concerning security, data protection and ownership, quality of services, and mobility need to be resolved before Cloud computing can be widely adopted. This paper proposes Mobile Cloud for Assistive Healthcare (MoCAsH) as an infrastructure for assistive healthcare. Besides inheriting the advantages of Cloud computing, MoCAsH embraces important concepts of mobile sensing, active sensor records, and collaborative planning by deploying intelligent mobile agents, context-aware middleware, and collaborative protocol for efficient resource sharing and planning. MoCAsH addresses security and privacy issues by deploying selective and federated P2P Cloud to protect data, preserve data ownership and strengthen aspects of security. It also addresses various quality-of-service issues concerning critical responses and energy consumption.