Hygeia: A Practical and Tailored Data Collection Platform for Mobile Health

Mobile health has attracted more attention in recent years as smartphones and wearable devices become more powerful and pervasive. However, data collection in mobile health remains an important as well as challenging problem, due to the fact that WiFi access points are not widely spread yet while 3G communication charges users to upload their information in real time. Existing solutions do not address this issue well and make it the obstacle for mobile health being applied in our daily lives. In this paper, we present Hygeia, a practical and optimized data collection platform for mobile health. The key insight behind Hygeia is to allow users to set up their own budgets for 3G communication, and a newly proposed algorithm, named BudMH, is adopted to make use of these resources in an optimized manner. We solve the challenge of not-priori-known information on data generation and WiFi encounters by leveraging historical information of system users. We fully implement Hygeia on Google Nexus 5 phones, and conduct two-week-long experiments on ten participants. Evaluation results demonstrate that Hygeia successfully achieves better system performance, especially increases timely data delivery significantly for high-risk healthcare data.