The Future of Mobile E-health Application Development: Exploring HTML5 for Context-aware Diabetes Monitoring

According to predictions of information technology research and advisory firms, such as Gartner, hybrid HTML5 appli- cations will be the future for mobile application development. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using HTML5 and related web application standards for the development of mobile e-health applications, using a diabetes monitoring application as a practical use case. Context-awareness and visualizing multivariate data with parallel coordinates for decision support are key features of this mobile e-health application. We compare the strengths and weaknesses of the hybrid HTML5 approach with native mobile applications, and report on practical experiences with the development and usage of the application. Our experiments show that developers of fairly advanced context-aware mobile applications can definitely benefit from the HTML5 application portability across different mobile platforms. However, compared to native applications, they should be aware of missing features such as secure storage, non-negligible performance penalties of JavaScript business logic on a mobile platform, and an inferior user experience.