Leveraging Mobile Cloud for Telemedicine: A Performance Study in Medical Monitoring

Telemedicine has proven to be an effective and promising solution in promoting more affordable and higher quality healthcare. Wearable body sensors and mobile devices have been widely used to monitor health status of patients or elderly and generate alarms in case of imminent medical conditions. However, the limited computation power and energy supply of mobile devices result in either high false alarm rate or short battery life, prohibitive for medical monitoring. Cloud computing embraces new opportunities of transforming healthcare delivery into a more reliable and sustainable manner. In this paper, we propose a mobile cloud telemedicine framework and discuss its potential performance by taking advantage of the real-time, on-site monitoring capability of Android mobile device and the abundant computing power of the cloud.