An Electronic Health Application for Disaster Recovery

Chissungo, Edmundo, Hanh Le and Edwin Blake (2010) An Electronic Health Application for Disaster Recovery. In Proceedings SoICT '10: Proceedings of the 2010 Symposium on Information and Communication Technology, pages 134-138, Hanoi, Vietnam.

Abstract

Natural disasters often destroy the fixed wired communications infrastructure. Therefore relying on such infrastructure after a catastrophe can be risky. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) can provide wireless network coverage without relying on a wired backbone infrastructure or dedicated access points. In this paper, we focus on using WMNs in disaster recovery areas in order to disseminate information from patient to doctors. We investigate whether we can deploy an electronic-health application on top of an ad hoc peer to peer network. The initial prototype shows that it is feasible. However the application quality varies depending on the number of multi-hops and the applications concurrently running on top of the WMN networks.