A Systematic Review on Recent Advances in mHealth Systems: Deployment Architecture for Emergency Response

The continuous technological advances in favor of mHealth represent a key factor in the improvement of medical emergency services. This systematic review presents the identification, study, and classification of the most up-to-date approaches surrounding the deployment of architectures for mHealth. Our review includes 25 articles obtained from databases such as IEEE Xplore, Scopus, SpringerLink, ScienceDirect, and SAGE. This review focused on studies addressing mHealth systems for outdoor emergency situations. In 60% of the articles, the deployment architecture relied in the connective infrastructure associated with emergent technologies such as cloud services, distributed services, Internet-of-things, machine-to-machine, vehicular ad hoc network, and service-oriented architecture. In 40% of the literature review, the deployment architecture for mHealth considered traditional connective infrastructure. Only 20% of the studies implemented an energy consumption protocol to extend system lifetime. We concluded that there is a need for more integrated solutions specifically for outdoor scenarios. Energy consumption protocols are needed to be implemented and evaluated. Emergent connective technologies are redefining the information management and overcome traditional technologies. © 2017 Enrique Gonzalez et al.