Patient-centric Handling of Diverse Signals in the mHealth Environment

In the context of the Mobile Health (or Telemedicine) many signals (data items) are exchanged between the medical devices, data storage units and involved persons. They are often treated as a uniform mass of "medical data", especially in the Big Data community. At a closer look, they unveil various characteristics, like type (single /continuous), required quality and tolerance for missing values. As in medical care time is crucial, real-time characteristics are important, like the sampling rate and the overall reaction time of the emergency system. The handling of data depends also on the severity of the medical case. Data are transferred and processed by external systems, therefore the overall function depends on the environment and the persons involved: from the user/patient to a dedicated medical emergency team. The collected data can be anonymously reused to gain or verify knowledge, what calls for a fair trade-off between the interests of the individual patient and the community. This paper discusses the semantics of mHealth data, like medical requirements, physical constraints and human aspects. This analysis leads to a more precise mathematical definition of the required data handling that helps to construct mHealth systems that better fulfill the health support function.