DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4067051 Journal of Computers & Signals (JCS) Vol. 1, No. 1, 2020 www.rsepress.com 6 | Page Development of Smartphone App for Tele-Care Medicine Applications Eng. Mohammed Ahmed Hanash 1 , Eng. Gaafar Ahmed AL-Aidaros 1 , Eng. Nadr Saleh Alenzi 2 , Eng. Bader Dakhil Allah Alrashdi 3 , Srinidhi Patil 4 , and Dr. K. Prahlad Rao 1 1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, KSA 2 Biomedical Manager, Dirayah Hospital, MOH, KSA 3 Biomedical Manager, Uyoun Al-Jawa General Hospital, MOH, KSA 4 Department of Information Science and Engineering, Acharya Institute of Technology, Bangalore, India Abstract— Many of the countries in the world are having the doctor to patient ratio far below than the prescribed number. Most of the developed countries also have serious health care issues in their rural areas because of the lesser density of physicians in such places. Despite this, information technology and mobile communication devices are growing rapidly. This technology has been successfully tapped by online shopping business giants. If the same technology is extended effectively to health care applications, then the world-wide scarcity of medical practitioners would be improved so that the larger wait of outpatients in the hospitals can be reduced. To serve this purpose, we developed mobile phone application software for Android devices. There are two separate apps; one for the doctor and another to the patient. Without the traditional method of consultations between the patient and the doctor, many health problems can be treated by monitoring the vital signs through these mobile apps. The software allows attaching medical images also along with the vital signs as text values. The medical data can be sent to the selected doctor by the patient through the web, after logging into the app. The doctor can suggest the course of treatment by typing the text in his app. Both apps were tested for their performance and security issues. Keywords— Android device, Java, health care, Smartphone, doctor, patient I. INTRODUCTION As Smart phones are becoming more users friendly, computationally powerful and less expensive; innovators are developing more and more application softwares (App’s) for various purposes. They cover a wide range of application from entertainment to scientific. In the field of medicine also many apps have been developed. An app can establish contact between two or many people virtually. This feature is more beneficial to bring the patients and doctors together for the healthcare purposes, including patient monitoring. In the recent years, health care consciousness has greatly increased and emphasized. But, the number of health care professionals is not proportionately increasing. But, it is found that the technology is tremendously progressing. Therefore, we developed a smart phone application software to benefit the patients and to improve the doctor to patient ratio. World Health Organization (WHO) has proposed 1:1000 ratio of doctor to patients for better service to the needful patients. From the available data [1], there are only 10-15 million physicians are available in the world. The ratio varies from developed countries to the poor. In the poor countries, it is pathetic. The developed countries also has shortage of doctors for the rural services. From our observations and news reports, everyday a large number of patients visit the hospital and the statistics supports our observations. According to the statistics of USA, about 125.7 million patients visited the hospital as outpatient and the report also says that there were 41 outpatient visits per 100 persons [2]. Patients visiting the OPD are not critically ill. They visit either to follow up of their treated diseases or for the treatment of health problems based on diagnosis reports, without necessarily requiring a bed in the hospitals. Such patients can be treated from home after submitting their diagnostic reports which are produced by medical diagnostic devices. The clinical reports can be sent to their general physician of choice for further treatment. This method of treatment without meeting the physician personally can be beneficial to both patient and the physician. To facilitate them for the virtual consultations rather than traditional face- to-face meetings, we have developed an app for the tele-care medicine by exploring the latest developments in IT (Information and Technology) field. Several mobile Apps in the medical field are available today. Most of them are related to the fitness tracking [3] [4] [5], public health services [6] and patient monitoring [7] [8]. We designed and developed the mobile app which allows to write the text, attach images and establishes web link between patient and doctor for remote diagnosis patient’s health problems. Our Smart phone app supports for sending vital parameters of the patient and the diagnostic images (CT, MRI or Ultrasound scans) can also be sent as an attachment along with those vital parameters. All the clinical parameters from the patient are received by the doctor through his smart phone through internet connectivity. The Figure (1) shown the workable sketch of our project. The detailed description of the software development is explained in the below section. II. METHODOLOGY There are three types of operating software widely used by mobile phones today. Accordingly, they are be known as Android based, iOS based, or Microsoft based phones which run with their respective software. The producers of each software claim that their phone models are best, however, Android phones are popular because they are affordable and secured Android software. The mobile operating software, Android is a modified version of Linux kernel and is designed for touchscreen feature that has been employed in Smartphones and tablets. Android software offers greater flexibilities than