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Rapidly expanding IT sector has spanned many areas affecting human lives such as communication, transportation, accounting, production, manufacturing automation, medical, healthcare, etc. Technology advent in ubiquitous or pervasive computing has also entered in the field of healthcare (Serrano, 2011; Elmisery, 2011; Foghlu, 2011; Donnelly, 2011; Storni, 2011; Fernstrom, 2011). For an u (ubiquitous)-Healthcare system to be a complete system, it should follow certain criteria called S.C.A.L.E. which stands for Scalability, Connectivity, Adaptability, Liability, and Ease-of-use (Cha, 2005; Pallapa, 2007). Currently, there is no such system which provides reusability, interoperability, availability, and loose coupling. Moreover, there are security and privacy issues in using a mobile based u-Healthcare system.
U-Healthcare systems in the current market are implemented to different extents. For example, there was work in the area of smart emergency and multi-agents system (Bergenti, 2010; Poggi, 2010). One part of ubiquitous healthcare market proposes u-Healthcare system with possible issues like security and privacy, but does not solve them. They just use the ubiquitous computing technology in their systems without solving any problems. None of these systems provides reuse and availability (Song, 2006).
One part of market develops a better u-Healthcare system by providing some security and privacy framework. Such u-Healthcare systems provide security and privacy to the data that are transmitted between clients and servers. Security is implemented by encrypting the data being transmitted and stored. Also the systems provide access control to the data so that there is no unauthorized access (Varshney, 2007).
One part of market provides security and privacy solutions to their u-Healthcare systems. Systems like SHOES provide extra security using steganography to protect the data (Cotroneo, 2004). Some also apply Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology to the u-Healthcare systems which make the systems reusable, interoperable, and loosely coupled (Riz, 2004). In spite of the features provided by the systems, they are not completely ubiquitous. They lack some ubiquitous system features (Pallapa, 2007; Cotroneo, 2006).