Healthcare: A new frontier for the mobile world

One of the major goals of IT in healthcare is to promote the extension of care beyond hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices to patients’ homes and other locations. Wireless communications is an important and essential part of these efforts, because unlike computers and other handheld devices, cellphones are ubiquitous, portable and provide both immediacy and convenience.

A noteworthy development is that the arrival of Apple’s iPhone on wireless (cellular) markets, first introduced in 2007, has generated an explosive growth of applications aimed at or adapted for mobile users from 3rd party developers that are useful – or entertain – for a wide variety of purposes. Healthcare is among these purposes.

Some examples of healthcare on mobiles are:

Pharmacy locators such as Quick Pharmacy which locks in your GPS coordinates and then opens up iPhone Maps with the pharmacies closest to you.

Google Health, helps its users to organize health information like current prescriptions, any existing health conditions, previous procedures, known allergies and more in one place. The Anvita Mobile Viewer enables users of Google Health to view their profile data from Android-powered devices such as the T-Mobile G1. Similarly, Health Cloud is a native iPhone client for Google Health.

Microsoft Heath Vault is also meant for storing and maintaining health and fitness information. And it is made available on mobile phones through AllOne Mobile’s platform.

Advances in this domain have barely scratched the surface on the ways these devices and mobile solutions will play out in the future. And just like the internet, the future of healthcare too is likely to be mobile.

iPhone and Micro-economic Paradox

It isn’t too Micro and isn’t too Soft. It is a robust machine, a proclaimed vanguard of smart phone business today. It is not for mediocre minds that run their crazy figures on rock-hard keypads. It is for those who relish technological sophistication. It is a grand brand of the mobile industry. It is ‘The Iphone’.

Let us digress from the iPhone rhetoric for some time and analyze a case study. Today the cost of iPhone 3G is $99. Suppose every month Apple sells 100 units of iPhone devices. Now should Apple increase the cost of iPhone 3G to $199, what happens to the sale figures? Your guess is as good as mine. But let us come out of quintessential demand-supply economic theory taught to all of us in kindergarten (not exactly though). If it is for us to think, we would condemn it as utter insanity. But let us hold our nerves and look at the actual sales figures. Flummoxed!! Sales figure rose to 120 per month!!!

Well that is the paradox. If Apple could do it, it would mean 1 Infinite loop, Cupertino gets flooded with dollars. Apple in some ways is on its way to create history in mobile business. Picture this:-

Apple shipped 13.7 million iPhones in the 2008 calendar year. If that’s not enough, have this:

New reports forecast that Apple will sell 50 million phones in 2011, and more than 80 million in 2012, as worldwide expansion and popularity of the iPhone continues to grow.

And if you are not fine with that, there are already ninety thousand denizen apps on Apple App Store, crossing 2 billion downloads. If Apple’s joy ride continues unhindered, people would soon add iPhone to their attire.

Such a fascination can disturb the market dynamics to such bizarre levels which could wipe peer business entities out of the market. People would desiderate to own the invaluably precious, sacrosanct, and figuratively Godly mobile device. This we call “Status symbol” products in micro-economics parlance. Status symbol products defy general supply-demand theory. Their demand increases with increase in product price. The only premise that fails the hypothesis is that sample space of consumers of such products is limited. But if Apple can play the game with technological wisdom and play their bets smartly, they can actually manipulate economies of scale to their favor. The strategy is not for me to suggest (and I am not competent to do so as well).

Mobile Analytics

With a huge business opportunity in the Mobile domain, Mobile Analytics helps gain critical insight into user behavior. User behavior needs to be studied to grab this potential opportunity, capture new audience and make a difference. Mobile site owners and content providers need to continuously monitor the usage of their content to improvise on their sites or content. To measure the success of mobile marketing and campaigns and their real time performance, mobile analytics is useful.
Some of the most popular reports to analyze user behaviors are:
· Count of unique visitors
· Time/ date of visit
· Geography or operator
· Search term
· Device specifics – manufacturer, model, versions, browser, operating system etc.
· Sequence of clicks, entry and exit pages
· Source of the request: For example if it was through search, advertising, campaigns, RSS feeds or a direct one.
Common methods for capturing data
1. Log files: All transactions pertaining to the Application is recorded by the web server in log files.
2. Capturing TCP/IP traffic using packet sniffers: This approach relies on installing an additional server (the "mobile analytics server") into your Web environment. A switch is then used to pass a copy of the incoming packet data to the mobile analytics data, while allowing the same packets to pass through to the mobile Web server without any delay. In addition to basic Web data, you can get information on handset resolution, the mobile operator, handset type, and browser type.
3. Site redirection: Traffic is redirected through a different server back to the mobile Web server. This also allows for the collection of a rich set of analytics data, similar to what you get with packet sniffing.
4. Tagging pages: A tag is placed on every page that needs to be tracked. When a user accesses a tagged page, event-level data is sent back to the web analytics tool. Tracking this way is not accurate as all mobile browsers do not support JavaScript.
5. Cookies: Web pages use cookies to track the return of users. This again is unreliable as all mobile browsers do not support cookies or they can be deleted or disabled.
Typical challenges faced:
1. Data collection: Some of the methods of collecting data described above have their own limitations.
2. Identification of unique users: The ability to track unique mobile users when they connect via operator gateway, WiFi, home broadband, when they are switching towers or if they change their connection. Cookies can solve this problem to some extent but not all mobile browsers support cookies or they can be disabled or deleted. Using packet sniffing if the HTTP header passed by the device has a unique id like the phone number, this can be used to track unique users.
3. Performance and Scalability: The solution should be capable to handle the enormous data.
4. Traffic source detection: Determining the source of traffic, such as search, advertising, campaigns, RSS feeds or a direct one can be tricky.
5. Handset capability: For better user experience and interface design, it is required to detect the handset capabilities like screen resolution, support for video downloads, ringtones etc.

Source: Internet

MOBILYSIS: - Ahead In Mobility

With nearly 85,000 applications and 2 billion downloads, iPhone app-store looks like a mega pool of money. But is it that simple? Surely not. A deluge of market players in the iPhone application development business portends a raging price war. Market players range from business giants to freelancers and each one seeks the biggest piece of pie. So, where does the differentiation lie? Change in Costing? Surely, if the player is big, slashing application cost won’t hurt much. But for smaller players that might lead to an end of the game. So does that mean packing up of bags? Not really.
At this moment I can feel a déjà vu .Years back web technology made a foray in the market and climbed the podium emphatically. Web technologies have rendered power and enthuse to all mortal beings in the technology business, what has glorified web technology is web analytics. So do we get a sense of MOBILYSIS (Mobile business analysis)? Can that be a differentiating factor in mobile business? Can mobile analytics provide better understanding of the current market requirements? Let’s delve a little into that.
The pie-chart below shows the market penetration of iPhone based on region. Does it take long to interpret the data? Nah!! North-Americans are the end users in the primary mobile-app market. But that wasn’t rocket-science or was it? In aught, data interpretation is subjective. One might target Asian market as well to gobble up the entire available piece of pie in the region. But that’s left for players to think.

Let’s move a little further. Before we go about studying consumer behavior let’s pin point as to who are the potential customers. The bar graphs below shall make that clear.

iPhone 3G(8GB) costs 99$ iPodTouch(8GB) costs 199$. Bewildered!! Well that’s up to micro economists to explain. Plain vanilla data interpretation is enough to recognize the potential consumers. “Behavior of consumers in the age group of 13-17 and 25-49 needs to be studied well”. Well!! that’s not a sound conclusion for astute business leaders to make. What if I tell you that sale of iPod is ten times to the sales of iPhone. That might help to put things into proper perspective. Now, that it’s easy to target the potential customers, it should be interesting to move ahead.
What if one wants to make a blistering entry into the mobile app market? Remember I hinted about costing before? Let’s talk about that a little. Bottomline and topline is what businesses think about. Well! I’d suggest keeping them aside for a moment. What if consumers associate mobile application with few players, one of them being you!! ‘Sales by volume’ is what we should be talking about. Create applications, put them on app store for free, grab the market rather gobble it up. Bottomline will look ugly as the investment will be huge (this again is subjective to the enterprise) and toplines will whine for months at stretch. Though it might be a fancy thought, it can be tried by big market players. The graph given below should endorse the words above.

A major decision is yet to be made. Which mobile application development platform will suit an enterprise’s profile?

Let’s analyze the bar graph above. Enterprises that wish to play a safe game would target first mobile platform in the graph above. More venturesome enterprises will take a more lofty stance and would target platform number three i.e. Apple. 333% growth in sales in a period of one year is emphatic. iPhone is already on its way to reign the mobile market. To stay away from it is a crime! Are we ready to rake in the moolah!!! Market players have squared down on this particular platform and have shown superb agility.
By now we know what to target, whom to target, and how to target. But will that suffice? Sure enterprises don’t want to create applications and dump them in their backyards. So what do they want?? Sell them of course. Let’s take a look down.

The graph above shows how an application grappled with bottoming sales before they leaped to a 53% increase in sales. Reason? An advertisement in Fortune magazine. Cool stuff by sales guys and that’s how you grab the market.
Examples shown above are mediocre as compared to actual in-depth analysis possible for mobile app business. Analytics provides an enterprise with the opportunity to stay ahead of the peers, take wise decisions and create brand image. But the domain is not limited. Enterprises can offer clients with long term mobile analysis to create market differentiation.

Mobile Cloud Computing

Cloud computing will be the future of the Web, and soon Mobile cloud computing will be a reality, when all the data and processing is going to happen at the Cloud. The mobile would become a device to access the cloud where the data storage and processing happens. Google is already ventured into Mobile cloud computing applications, the mobile version of Gmail and Google Maps are on the Cloud. However most of the applications today do the data storage and processing on the Mobile devices and not the cloud, they only use the Infrastructure for hosting their applications.

Mobile Cloud will be explored by device manufactures, service providers and mobile application development companies because of the growth potential. According to ABI Research forecast there will be almost 1 billion users of mobile cloud applications by 2014. It has also been predicted that cloud computing will tune $20 billion revenues by end of 2014. The Platform-as- a-service players like Google and Amazon will begin to market their mobile capabilities aggressively starting 2010.

Enterprise Mobility on cloud will have many advantages; one main advantage is that it reduces the significance of the device operating system, providing easier support for different mobile handset manufacturers. The current enterprise mobile applications are developed specific to one operating system, or many version of the same application to suite different OS. These enterprise applications require significant processing power and memory on the device. If the enterprise applications are developed on the cloud using web development technologies, applications can run on the server instead of the device, so handset requirements are reduced and developers can develop just one version of the application.

The data will be stored on the cloud which has both advantages and disadvantages, the advantage is even if the device is lost the risk of data loss is reduced as the data is constantly synchronized with the server. Also the storage capacity and processing power of the server is more than any handset which increases the application performance. The enterprise mobility has concerns with the security and management of the application & data on the cloud. A cloud-based application will stop working if the network is not available, but new languages like HTML 5 could provide a helping hand as it can enable caching on the handset, allowing the work to continue until the network is available.

Start exploring the power of Mobile Cloud today.

Emulator Testing Vs. Real Device Testing

Mobile world and applications developed are forced by the limitations viz. limitation of the device, processing power, memory, and bandwidth.
To handle the device challenge you have two options
1) You can test using real devices.
2) You can use using emulated devices.
Real devices have the advantage of having all the limitations and quirks in the actual client hardware and firmware combination in the hands of your target consumers but majority of mobile testing is done on emulators. Reason being testing being real devices is incredibly expensive
First they are expensive to buy and forget about the advertised price, for those are the operator subsidized prices that come only with a contract that has its own cost implications. You might be able to get a manufacturer or network operator to loan you device for testing, but you need to join waiting list and convince manufacturer or network operator that you should be priority. Airtime and subscription cost also need to be paid AND FINALLY testing with real device is labor intensive and the availability and cost of labor is pretty high.
But there is another aspect of testing with real device that you need to consider. Real handset is not designed with testing in mind. The limited processing power and storage of the handset does not allow on board diagnostic software to be loaded so they lack instrumentation. With real devices you will not be able to record the protocols going back and forth between device and your application and this will limit the ability to isolate problem and make corrections.
So emulators are forced to be a part of mobile application testing.

Sync data while you are "Mobile"

You (your mobile device) can browse and perform some action on most of the websites provided you are connected to the internet. How about performing few actions even when you are not connected to the internet due to no-network coverage. It’s good to have an offline capability of your web application in these scenarios. One common way of implementing this is having our local database such as “SQL Server Compact Edition” or “Oracle database Lite”.

The challenge with having a local database is data-sync problem. I don’t have much exposure to Oracle Lite. The previous versions of SQL CE (short form for SQL Server Compact Edition) have some limitations on synchronizing the data from mobile to a central SQL server. This is due to the following database limitation.

1) SQL CE is a single user database
2) SQL CE multi-threads are not really thread safe.

Microsoft SQL Compact Edition 2005 version overcame these issues. It’s now a multi-user database and thread safe. What it really means is while data synchronizing, user need not come out of the application which is accessing this database. The user can perform his / her regular operations while the data-sync operation continues in the background. This background data-sync works even when a mobile goes out of network coverage (due to being in an elevator etc) for a brief stint.

As always, any application working with multiple database instances carriers its own challenges such as “Conflicting changes” or “Concurrency” etc. Even SQL CE provides an option to “Merge” the data changes, it is still your responsibility to manage them through some good practices such as proper lock / unlock, multi-step data-sync operation and frequency / timing of data-sync operation.