Design and Evaluation of Wireless Health Care Information Systems in Developing Countries

In many developing countries there is a tremendous demand for communication and information services, but conventional wired infrastructure to implement them is lacking. Wireless communication is easier and cheaper to introduce and to maintain, especially in remote and less developed areas. Based on the analysis of a distributed health care information system in Tanzania, the main requirements of wireless data communication in developing countries are derived and the suitability of wireless technologies is discussed. In order to cope with the limited bandwidth and unreliability of wireless communication links as well as to reduce communication costs, wireless information systems need to employ data replication. Therefore, this chapter also proposes a replication strategy for such wireless health care information systems in developing countries like Tanzania, and assesses its performance in terms of communication costs using workload characteristics from the Tanzanian case study.