1. Rural Healthcare System Using Location Based
Mobile Services
Gaurav Arora1
Lubhna Kaul2
Nishank Kumar3
Pamil Gurung4
R.H.Goudar5
Department Of CSE
Graphic Era University
Dehradun, India
1gauravarora.ind@hotmail.com 2lubhnakaul@gmail.com 3nishankkumar1994@rediffmail.com 4pamilgurung@gmail.com
5rhgoudar@gmail.com
Abstract: This paper presents how the technology can
be used in order to provide healthcare services, which
helps a patient to find a hospital nearest to his
location and avails proper treatment on time and is
deployed on a mobile device having an android based
platform which is conveniently used and carried that
works with the help of GPS system. The system
fetches the location of the user whenever the user
wants to search for a hospital or a particular doctor
around his location, and is provided with the names
of the universally accepted and prescribed medicines
for a particular disease. There exists many
applications till date, but a large number of people die
in certain rural parts of this world, since there are no
medical facilities in such areas and people don’t even
have a medical shop in a radius of ten to twenty
kilometres. The people of such location either have to
cover very long distances which they can’t even
afford or has to depend on the medicines of the
chemist shop that is present in such locations. They
neither know the name of the medicine nor do they
know that the medicine that they are getting is
expired or fresh. Hence, the proposed system ensures
that user can reach to the nearest hospital and also
avails the ambulance services in case of emergencies.
Apparently this service is convenient to all.
Index Terms – GPS, LBS, GPRS, Google Map.
I. INTRODUCTION
Over the past few years mobile technology has
shown a rapid change and this is due to the fastest
growing technology and the rising needs of the
people. In the present scenario smartphones and
android technology has become a common part of
everyone’s life even in rural areas also, still people
are not able to take its advantage. Still they had to
struggle in order to get even basic medical facilities
in this environment. In rural areas people do not
even know the medicines for the diseases that they
are receiving by the local chemist shop, normally
they visit the local medical shop tell their
symptoms and in return they are given medicines
which might not cure their disease and due to such
an improper treatment it has resulted in the death or
some major disabilities to the people that is a result
of improper treatment due to unawareness and lack
of knowledge.
Android is a mobile operating system initially
developed by Android Inc. which Google backed
financially and later bought in 2005. Compared
with ios, Android is an open source system, so we
can modify it to fulfil the basic needs of the
generation. Android has become such a used
technology now days which has competed the
various other options in the industry. This can be
very well explained as follows. Firstly the cell
phone is easy to carry. People always have the cell
phones with them. Secondly, the implementation of
an open source operating system has made it very
easy, cheaper and convenient to extend the services
required. Thirdly, the GPS system makes it very
convenient to locate to any place which in return
decreases the time and convenient to use. [2]A
location-based service (LBS) is a mobile
application that is based totally on the cellular
devices. LBS was defined as follows: “it utilizes
the ability to make the best use of location of the
mobile devices. LBS is an information service,
accessible with cellular devices, it can be used in
variety of contexts, like health, personal life etc. It
is used to identify the location of a person or
object, such as detecting the nearest ATM or where
about of a friend or employee. It also includes
parcel tracking and vehicle tracking services.
LBS have two major aspects on which it works and
that is:
1. Obtaining the location of user
2. Utilizing information to provide a service.
[3] M-healthcare system is the mobile healthcare
system which includes the use of mobile devices in
collecting community and clinical health data.
Delivery of health care information to practioners,
researchers and patients’ vital sign and direct
provision of care. In this system mobile application
was developed using sun java wireless toolkit

2. installed in mobile and using that the application
the report of the patient stored in the server
database can be retrieved using this mobile
application, it retrieves from the server database.
The data was encrypted in the database and was
decrypted in the mobile.
[4] Healthcare production systems are challenged
by increasing demand and the need to maintain
efficiency and cost effectiveness. The increasing
patient volumes are caused primarily by three
factors: 1) increased treatment opportunities, 2)
epidemic increase in chronic disease such as
diabetes and hypertension, 3) an aging population
increasing number of healthcare providers address
the second factor by shifting parts of the
responsibility for chronic disease management.[5]
Healthcare for elder people has become a major
issue. The Wearable Health Monitoring System
(WHMS) is used for the care and management of
some chronic diseases of elderly people by giving
them special care and needs. The system proposed
a technique in which the system will track the
current location of the patient when the Emergency
Medical Service has been activated as well as it
will also locate the nearest healthcare centre as
possible. The location coordinates of the
patients can be retrieved by GPS and sent to
the healthcare centre using GPRS.[6] Healthcare
has become a major issue which varies with
location and the services provided at particular
place. Some aspects like physical, environmental,
economic and biological. Needs of patients vary
with places and distances. The internet offers a big
pool of health information that can answer the
needs of clinicians and their patients. It also carries
with the risk of overloading them with unnecessary
information.
[7] Location based services offer many advantages
to users to retrieve the information and to process
the correct data at correct time irrespective of the
weather conditions and location. This paper tells
about the location based services using the Google
Web Services Walk Store Transit API's on Android
Phones to give multiple services to the user based
on their Location.[8] This paper deals with the
efficiency, availability of services and accessibility
of resources were taken into consideration in which
quantitative measures were defined and all criteria
looking the desired location and the current
location was measured and the major objective was
to the hospital and patient distance.[9] This paper
was particularly meant for Dehradun, the capital of
Uttarakhand where it became very difficult to
locate the nearest healthcare centre in case of
emergency, with this a study was developed where
an application for Dehradun health services using
high-resolution images and GIS data to generate
spatial maps facilities with the use of mobile
mapping and LBS.[10] Health services research
(HSR) goal is to provide the information that will
eventually lead to improvements in the health of
the citizens. Health professions and on many
academic disciplines, including biostatistics,
epidemiology, health economics, medicine,
nursing. This system aims at providing Patient
Safety, Effectiveness of the system, Timeliness,
Patient Centred and Equity.
[11] This paper gives a system which provides the
registered a facility of viewing the medication
records, lab reports, the patients can schedule
appointments, send messages to doctor and other
certain location based services like locating the
healthcare centres and getting information about
the local health events. This system provides the
doctors and patients to connect to each other via a
client server model and gives patients a choice of
location based services and other services. In this
systemthe doctors can make the prescription of the
patients online, just by seeing the records of the
patient in his profile. Here, the users manage their
account through web interfaces. This is a client
server model, where the server is all time running
and manages patient’s database transactions, and
services based on the location of the user. [12] This
paper provides an idea of traditional healthcare
systems, how the location based services were used
and the technologies used for determining the
location of the user and the applications in the
healthcare systems. This paper provides a basis for
designing the truly ubiquitous healthcare service
using the present technologies on wireless sensor
networks and mobile IP. This systemalso provides
a concept of wearable light device for old people
capable of detecting their location and also capable
of measuring the vital signs in user’s health and
communicating automatically to his care service
provider. This ubiquitous system performs
functions such as the health data collected through
sensors are amplified and transmitted through IP,
the transmitted data is interpreted, stored, updated
and analysed based on certain medical facts.

3. Our system is a location based healthcare system
that is deployed on an Android operating system
which is an open source technology. Our system
provides the healthcare services on the basis of the
location of the user, where the user can just type
the name of some common diseases and can get the
names of the best prescribed medicines that are
universally accepted for that particular disease.
Another important function that our system
performs is that we provide instructions of proper
first aid to be done in case of some minor or major
accidents or casualties so that the victims can get a
first aid before getting a proper treatment from a
physician or by the time physician arrives. Our
system also provides a facility in case of
emergencies. In such a case of emergency people
usually don’t have the contact number of the
ambulance which can cause delay for the patient.
We tried to remove such a delay, as every single
second counts in case of emergencies, hence in our
system as we are providing the facility of calling
the ambulance in case of emergencies.
Another important feature of our system is based
on the location of the user. As it is discussed above
it is a location based system, the user can search the
nearest hospital based on his current location. Our
system works on the global positioning system i.e.
(GPS) which fetches the current location of the user
and gives the nearest hospital or doctor available
around his current location.
Now smart phones support internet access so when
the user is not feeling well or there is an
emergency, he can log into the system, and avail
the services provided by our system. Hence, he
does not have to depend on the unknown medicines
given by the chemist (especially in case of rural
areas).
The rest of the paper is organized as follows.
Section II introduces the general design and system
architecture. Section III gives the detailed
algorithm that is used in our system. Section IV
presents the conclusion and future work.
II. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
There are two diagrams which show the basic
architecture and the functioning of our system:
Fig. 1 Functionality Overview
This diagram shows the functionality of how the
systemwill work in case of emergencies. Here, one
of the features shown is that of the ambulance, in
case of an emergency the user can directly select
the emergency call tab in his android smartphone
and his call is automatically transferred to the local
or nearest ambulance service available around his
location. Another most important feature of our
system shown here is that of finding the nearest
hospital around the user. Its functioning will be, the
GPS will fetch the current position of the user,
hospitals are searched around that location and the
hospital with the least distance relative to the user’s
location will be calculated and displayed.
The working of the following diagram is explained
below:
Fig.2 Detailed Retrieval of Results
The user will access this app through his
smartphones, firstly the user can query for some of
the first aids or some which medicine is prescribed

4. for a certain disease. Both these queries will fetch a
result if present in the database. Secondly, if the
user wants to search for some hospitals or doctors
nearby him then the role of GPS or LBS comes into
play. The GPS fetches the current location of the
user, searches for the hospitals or doctors locates
them on Google map and then makes a list of all
the doctors or hospitals that the user is looking for.
Then our system calculates the distance between
the current location of the user and the results that
we received now. The minimum distance is
searched and the details of that nearest hospital or
doctorare displayed on user’s smartphone.
Following are the snapshots of the application
designed on the same:
Fig. 3.a Home Page
Fig. 3. bMain MenuPage
Fig. 3.c. SearchingDoctor
III. ALGORITHM
There are two basic algorithms used in our system:
A. For Finding Nearest Hospitals
1. Step 1. Initialise Cur_loc, Doc[ ], Hosp[ ],
Add[ ], Min, Dist[ ],K,i,j
2. Step 2. Cur_loc=fetchGPS( )
3. Step 3. If name of illness matches in our
database then the Doctor serving the illness
Doc[i++] = Doctor
4. Step 3. n=i - 1
5. Step 4. Hosp[ ]<- list of Hospitals from
Database
6. Step 5. For i =1 to n
Add[i++] = findAddress(Doc[i++])
Or Add[i++]= findAddress(Hosp[i++])
7. Step 6. Min = dist of Cur_loc to
locateOnMap(Add[0]). // locateOnMap() is a
function which finds the location on map of Add[ ]
and computes the distance from Cur_loc.
8. Step 6. For i= 1 to n
{
Dist[i]= locateOnMap(Add[i]).
If( Dist[i] < min)
{
Min <- dist[i]
K=i
}
9. i++
}
10. Step 7. Display Add[k], locateOnMap(Add[k]),
Hosp[k] and rating(Hosp[k]).
B. For finding the list of doctors.
1. Step 1. Initialize illness, Cur_loc,Doc[ ], Add[
], Dist[ ]
2. Step 2. Read the value of illness from user

5. 3. Step 3. Cur_loc = fetchGPS( ). //fetchGPS( )
is a function which fetches the current location of
user
4. Step 4. While (Doctormatches to the illness)
Doc[i++] = Doctor
5. Step 5. n = i - 1
6. Step 6. For each i=1 to n
7. Add[i++] = findAddress(Doc[i++]) //
function which searches for the address of each
doctorand stores it in the array Add[ ]
8. Step 7. For i= 1 to n
Dist[i++] = distance(Add[i++]). //
distance() isa function that computes the distance
from Cur_loc to Add[i++]
9. Step 8. For i=1 to n-1
{
For j=i+1 to n
{
If(Dist[i] >Dist[j])
{
Dist[i] <-> Dist[j]
Doc[i] <-> Doc[j]
Add[i] <-> Add[j]
}
}
}
10. Step 9. For i= 1 to n
{
Display(Doc[i]) // Display() func
displaysthe sorted arrays
Display(Add[i])
Display(Dist[i])
}
The above two algorithms find the nearest hospitals
and a list of specialized doctors around the current
location of the user. The first algorithm finds the
nearest hospital, first of all the user’s location is
checked and the list of hospitals serving the illness
of the user is checked in our database. After that
the address of all the hospitals are found and based
on the latitudinal and longitudinal address we can
locate those hospitals on the Google Map. After
that we will compute the distance of all the
hospitals from our current location and then
minimum distance is computed from user’s current
location. The hospitals nearest from the location of
the userwill be displayed.
The second algorithm finds a list of doctors
around the location of the user in the ascending
order of distance from the user. The doctors serving
the illness entered by the user will be matched in
our database and their geo address is searched on
the map, after that their respective distances are
computed from the user’s current location and are
stored in a list. That list is sorted in the ascending
order of their distance and is displayed with their
respective addresses and doctor’s name.
IV. CONCLUSION & FUTURE WORK
Our system, thus, provides the healthcare services
based on the location of the user. This system
serves all the people residing from urban to rural
areas. Hence, our systemserves the best in all those
remote areas where there are very less medical
facilities and where there is very less awareness or
less knowledge among people so as to take proper
and necessary measures on time. The further work
that can be done in this project is that the hospitals
and doctors are to be plotted more precisely on the
Google map so as to give the best possible and
accurate results. Also, in this systemour database is
the remote database that needs to be synced with
the user’s device after every certain interval of
time. So we can implement this app in such a way
as to make the database local for every user where
he can also access the services without an internet
connection.
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