Q3 Technologies: Mobile PDA Device

Q3 Technologies, Gurgaon, India ndeveloped a solution for Mobile PDA device synchronizations for seamless data transfer.

Business Situation:

Client needed mobile-based standalone application that would facilitate clinical trials – a type of medical research that is conducted in phases by means of health specific questions, initially on a small scale and then in a larger context. Client required the application not only to allow designing of questions, but facilitate dynamic updations in the design as well.

Practical Situation:

A patient has been assigned a questionnaire for a particular form of disease, but the doctor diagnoses a new form of disease symptom in the patient. So a new questionnaire has to be designed for him. A new set of questionnaires is prepared by the administrator and it needs to be sent to the patient’s PDA.

Solution:

Since, the standalone application for designing questionnaires was to be built for mobile devices, it was implied that the dynamic updations in the questionnaires should be achieved remotely and automatically. Technically, it meant that the standalone application running on a Desktop machine should be able to synchronize with the application running on patient’s PDA.

Synchronization is the process of establishing consistency among data on remote sources and the continuous harmonization of the data over time. Synchronization refers to one of the two distinct, but related concepts, and they are:

• Synchronization of processes,
• Synchronization of data

In process synchronization, multiple processes are to join up, so as to reach an agreement or commit to a certain sequence of action. In data synchronization, multiple copies of a dataset are kept in coherence with one another, or to maintain data integrity. Process synchronization primitives are commonly used to implement data synchronization.

Q3 Technologies decided that a synchronization tool will be developed and installed on the server, which helps in the synchronization process; automatically copying changes back and forth. This tool will allow an incoming GPRS transmission to overwrite the application file with a new application. As a result, once an application build (containing questionnaires) is installed on the SD card of patient’s PDA, any changes made to the corresponding build on Desktop, will be updated on the SD card of the PDA. The SD card number and mobile number of the PDA will be used for synchronization purpose.