When we are talking about Freedom, we are talking about Free Software and Open Source hardwares. Sadly, at present very few even single board computers are 100% philosophy of GNU compliant. Sadly, for unknown reasons, various Governmental healthcare sectors (which includes NHS) promote proprietary companies like Microsoft and their product like Microsoft Windows. It is good that they are promoting healthcare mobile app development as frankly healthcare should be near free, easily accessible to all humans on this earth. However, data theft, breech of privacy, Governmental mass surveillance are potential matters which a Free Software developer should think as person’s health data can get stolen and sold to the devil pharmacy companies. Here is a data privacy compliant guide for healthcare mobile app development on cloud focussing the cross domain developers, data scientists.
Guide For Healthcare Mobile App Development on Cloud
It is practical to develop primarily a mobile responsive website as primary application backend. That approach makes the mobile application even needed to develop for iOS, Android easier. Cost of becoming developer of those segment is not cheap but primarily a mobile responsive website is cheap. Healthcare industry at present has softwares mostly either developed by the medical professionals or peoples related to GNU, FSF, Apache, Debian and so on. Free Software developers must not care any Healthcare Product Regulatory Agency but rely on GNU, FSF for philosophy of software development. We should remember that the persons like Richard Stallman gifted the freedom in today’s Free Softwares we are using, among which definitely GNU/Linux is a big product. Healthcare Product Regulatory Agencies must follow the philosophy of GNU, FSF as they are questionable in the context of ethics, moral. Furthermore they do not rely on ethical matters set by Hippocrates, but they has history of allowing dangerous killer medicine like Rofecoxib. In other words – unless there is commercial reason for a client, software development must for community be compliant with philosophy of GNU, FSF.
Although Cloud mostly itself not compliant with philosophy of GNU, FSF; but deployment on cloud in various platforms like PaaS or even on Object Storage/CDN can save the ongoing cost of hosting.
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As for general purpose framework, WordPress is a great platform as application development too.
What application to develop? This application is a great example :
1 | https://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/nhs-health-check/Pages/check-your-heart-age-tool.aspx |
Source code of the same can be found here on GitHub :
1 | https://github.com/BritCardSoc/JBS3Risk |
Similar easy applications can be developed only with jQuery, CSS, HTML and hosted on CDN/Object Storage. Unless we need a database, there is no reason to increase cost of hosting by going beyond CDN.
Again, the question – what applications to develop? Obviously which gives easy answer to regular health questions and has a logical flowcharts like Headache, Hirsutism etc.
Full fledged mobile applications should be limited to extreme need of installation for the purpose of saving data on mobile phone’s storage, like personal health records.
Of course, we should involve open source electronics in healthcare which includes open source USG.
When there is web server, we should try to use Apache web server, use Let’s Encrypt and apply, maintain all possible security measures on server side.
When we will have lot of web based Free Softwares for day to day diagnosis, we can build a specialised GNU/Linux distribution for diagnosis in remote areas.
Tagged With health checking applications in the cloud , healthcare and app development