Service based adhoc networking for patient‘s pain diary on mobile devices

As was proposed earlier, mobile devices may be integrated into the clinical workflow or daily activity by supporting documentary procedures or self-paced medical log keeping (Hofmann et al. 2009). However, due to security reasons up till now only dedicated workstations at the primary care provider‘s desk were intended to retrieve collected data from the mobile logging device. We propose an extension of this scheme to securely upload and process collected data by ad hoc web-service connections. In our case, we use a touch interfaced handheld device to assess pain levels by an electronic Visual Analog Scale. The individually identifiable handheld collects and stores its patient‘s input, until a WLAN connection is sensed. It then transfers the data on a Cloud-located SQL based sever for further storage and competent retrieval. The communication between handheld and server is based on an authentificated, secure SHTTP protocol. This way, an authenticated, but remote computer based tool can access the data from the SQL Database for further clinical assessment. Mobile devices are used in a clinical setting to log volunteer‘s „pain“ levels in parallel to usual physical log keeping. Data are transferred asynchronously and without user interaction to the analysis desktop by utilizing the Institutes WLAN infrastructure. Given our preliminary results, it appears reasonable to utilize the usability and acceptance of modern handheld devices to asynchronously log and transfer even sensitive medical data over secure internet connections.