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easyHealthApps: e-Health Apps Dynamic Generation for Smartphones & Tablets

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Abstract

Mobile phones and especially smartphones have been embraced by a rapidly increasing number of people worldwide and this trend is expected to evolve even more in the years to come. There are numerous smartphone Apps that record critical medical data in an effort to solve a particular health issue each time. We studied such applications and not surprisingly, we have found that development and design effort is often repeated. Software patterns have been detected to exist, however re-usability has not been enforced. This leads to lost programming manpower and to increased probability of repeating bugs in Apps. Moreover, at the moment smartphone e-Health Apps demand time, effort and costs for development. Unfortunately even simple data recording Apps are practically impossible to be produced by multiple health domain users who are not developers. In this work, we propose, design and implement a simple and integrated solution which gives healthcare professionals and researchers the ability to create their own data intensive smartphone applications, independent of the desired healthcare domain. The proposed approach applies efficient software techniques that hide development from the users and enable App creation through a simple Web User Interface. The Apps produced are in native format and it is possible to dynamically receive m-Health business logic and the chosen UI. Evaluation of the proposed solution has shown that the generated Apps are functionally and UI equivalent to human-coded Apps according to a number of comparison parameters. Furthermore, e-Health professionals show particular interest in developing Apps on their own for a particular domain they focus on.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund – ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program "Education and Lifelong Learning" of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) - Research Funding Program: Heracleitus II. Investing in knowledge society through the European Social Fund. The authors would like to thank Mr. Gougoulias, Mr. Korezelidis for coding parts of the human-coded apps and especially Mr. Nodarakis for the initial web interface. The authors would also like to express their gratitude anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering & Informatics, School of Engineering, University of Patras, Rio Campus, 26500, Patras, Greece

    Mersini Paschou, Evangelos Sakkopoulos & Athanasios Tsakalidis

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  1. Mersini Paschou
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  2. Evangelos Sakkopoulos
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  3. Athanasios Tsakalidis
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Correspondence to Evangelos Sakkopoulos.

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Paschou, M., Sakkopoulos, E. & Tsakalidis, A. easyHealthApps: e-Health Apps Dynamic Generation for Smartphones & Tablets. J Med Syst 37, 9951 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-013-9951-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-013-9951-6

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