Mobile Health from Developers’ Perspective

Abstract

This paper extends an initial investigation of eHealth from the developers’ perspective. In this extension, our focus is on mobile health data. Despite the significant potential of this development area, few studies try to understand the challenges faced by these professionals. This perspective is relevant to identify the most used technologies and future perspectives for research investigation. Using a KDD-based process, this work analyzed eHealth and mHealth discussions from Stack Overflow (SO) to comprehend this developers’ community. We got and processed 6082 eHealth and 1832 mHealth questions. The most discussed topics include manipulating medical images, electronic health records with the HL7 standard, and frameworks to support mobile health (mHealth) development. Concerning the challenges faced by these developers, there is a lack of understanding of the DICOM and HL7 standards, the absence of data repositories for testing, and the monitoring of health data in the background using mobile and wearable devices. Our results also indicate that discussions have grown mainly on mHealth, primarily due to monitoring health data through wearables and about how to optimize resource consumption during health-monitoring.