Challenges of Mobile Health Applications in Developing Countries - E-Healthcare Systems and Wireless Communications - page 15

technology on existing infrastructure needs to
be demonstrated. By coupling cell phones with
Wi-Fi infrastructure and traditional data services,
the full potential of Mobile Health deployment
could be realized.

into compliance as quickly as possible. There are
security risks beyond conventional networks when
using Mobile Health applications because these
devices are prone to being misplaced or stolen.
System designers need to enforce security features
on the phone, including biometric, fingerprint, or
password authentication when a Mobile Health
session is initiated. The operating system (OS)
of a mobile phone needs to be engineered to be
resistant to tampering. It is necessary to use au-
thentication and encryption over wireless mediums
to avoid misuse of confidential medical records.
There are more commercial products becoming
available to protect viral data on lost and stolen
devices as well. Asynchrony's PDA Bomb, Teal-
point's Teallock, and TrustDigital's PDA Secure
are just a few of these. They allow enforcement
of security policies and data/application encryp-
tion. There is a need in developing countries to
adopt a layered security hierarchy in consultation
with hospital organizations. There is also a need
for a thorough review and discussion of all the
associated security loopholes in mHealth systems
and to have security checkpoints at each level of
medical record access. Some applications have the
ability to destruct data on tampering, which is a
good example of preventing misuse of information
once a mobile device falls into the wrong hands.

Socioeconomic Challenges

In the developing world, there are very steep socio-
economic gaps across families and individuals. It
is necessary to seek maximum participation across
all social classes to maximize the effectiveness of
mHealth applications. To realize the full potential
of Mobile Health in the community there needs to
be an awareness of the economic and social advan-
tages of these technologies. Sometimes, cultural
beliefs keep people in under-served communi-
ties from actively participating in sharing their
health information for fear of being ostracized in
their community. It is necessary to start mHealth
education initiatives to educate people on the full
benefits of Mobile Health technology. For people
who cannot afford mobile phones, provisions need
to be made to loan them phones to allow them in
improving their lifestyle and realizing the benefits
of such solutions.

Security and Privacy Challenges

Analytical Challenges Medical records are confidential pieces of data

and it is very important to protect them. With the
growth of mHealth applications, there has been an
explosion of many useful applications, systems,
and tools. As with personal computers in the
early days, a lot of isolated high potential tools
are emerging. However, since mHealth is still in
its infancy, these tools need additional integra-
tion and security in order to protect confidential
medical records (Stanford, V., 2002). The HIPAA
(Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act)
of 1996 has changed the legal scenario for the
access and sharing of such medical records. A
challenge faced by health care IT executives and
mHealth system providers is to bring their systems

It is necessary to provide real-time analysis and
evaluation of a patient's health statistics and
physiological data logged from remote mobile
devices and there has been a lot of research on
how to accomplish this (Danielle Apiletti et al.,
2009; Valeriy Nenov et al., 1996). This kind of
analysis enables automatic learning of different
behavioral models tailored to specific diseases and
patients. Frameworks for analyzing instantaneous
data streams over a sliding time window have
been proposed to allow ubiquitous monitoring
over mobile devices. Previous work (Danielle
Apiletti et al., 2009) proposed an algorithm for