The Seamless Communication on a Rural Island in Japan: A Qualitative Study from the Perspective of Healthcare Professionals

On remote islands, interprofessional collaboration is essential to support older adults who live at home, despite the limited number of healthcare professionals (HCPs). Therefore, it is important for HCPs to collect and share information about older adults with health problems. This study aimed to clarify how rural HCPs collaborate using limited resources to support older adults in remote islands. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 healthcare providers for older adults on Zamami Island of Okinawa, Japan. We performed a qualitative analysis using the steps for coding and theorization method. Four themes were extracted: “Collection and communication of information between residents”, “Communication of information from non-HCPs to HCPs”, “Sharing of information between HCPs”, and “HCPs taking action to initiate their approach”. Islanders take care of each other and know each other’s health status, while HCPs gather their health information. When necessary, HCPs on the island gain essential information regarding older adult patients from islanders not only through work, but also through personal interactions. Afterward, HCPs approach older adults who need health care. The human connections on this remote island serve as social capital and enable flexibility in both gathering information and seamless communication among islanders who also serve as informal resources that contribute support for older adults.

Seamless communication techniques in mobile cloud computing: A survey

Achieving seamless communication and smooth service provision between the cloud and end user's mobile device is one of the main challenges existing in mobile cloud environments. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) allows cloud environments to mitigate resource limitation problems for mobile devices. The most popular mobile devices such as smartphones, autonomous vehicles, drones, and other smart electronic equipment are in constant motion and frequently change their point of connection (base station or edge) to mobile computing networks. In these situations of mobility, the data being transmitted, and the services being provided to the device should not be interrupted as the proper function of the device depends on these services. Applications that rely heavily on data and services stored in the cloud environment should be available even when the device has moved from one pole to another. Various existing generic surveys emphasize important solutions to some of the challenges faced in MCC. Different solutions were proposed to achieve seamless communication in MCC, presenting the taxonomy of the interworking and mobility techniques and their possibilities. However, they have not provided a clear evaluation of MCC techniques for achieving seamless communication and service provision, and have not taken into consideration current technological advances such as 5G, femtocell, etc. In this paper, we provide a survey of the different solutions proposed to achieve seamless communication in MCC by taking current technological advances into account. Furthermore, some shortcomings associated with the presented methods are outlined, along with the current issues and research challenges faced in MCC. However, for the purposes of data protection and security, previously proposed schemes already achieve the goal of protecting users' attribute privacy and they have the same access policy; some can even achieve full security, but they are just limited in decryption efficiency.