Evidence-Based Development Approach for Safe, Sustainable and Secure Mobile Medical App

According to industry surveys, by 2018, more than 1.7 billion smartphone and tablet users will have downloaded at least one mobile medical app (MMA) [40]. Such widespread adoption of smartphone based medical apps is opening new avenues for innovation, bringing MMAs to the forefront of low cost healthcare delivery. These apps often control human physiology and work on sensitive health data, thus it is necessary to have evidences of their trustworthiness before actual marketing. The key challenges in ensuring trustworthiness of MMAs are maintaining privacy of health data, long term operation of wearable sensors and ensuring no physical harm to the user. Traditionally, clinical studies are used to generate evidences of trustworthiness of medical systems. However, they can take a long time and could potentially harm the user during studies. Thus it is essential to establish trustworthiness of MMAs before their actual use. One way to generate such evidences can be using simulations and mathematical analysis. These methods involve estimating the MMA interactions with human physiology. However, the nonlinear nature of human physiology makes the estimation challenging.