 |
 |
|
|
| Delivering the Future . . . Prescient Solutions. |
 |
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
Wireless Projects Case Studies Over the last 3 years, Prescient International has been heavily involved in deploying wireless and mobile solutions specifically for two major verticals, Financial and Health Services. Much of this work has been tendered in several functional and technical capacities including business strategies/solutions, systems integration, systems architecture, and application development enabling efficient communication, utilization, and management of data. Prescient is committed to integrating business operations with the latest in wireless technologies in order to provide scalable, reliable, highly available and secure solutions that raise efficiencies across the enterprise. The following describe Prescient's Mobile Solutions Projects:
Project 1: Electronic Health Management System (EHMS™) top The EHMS™ is a web-based, device-independent, comprehensive Practice and Clinical Management system, allowing physicians to access information securely from connected, or wireless devices, from anywhere, anytime, thereby maximizing efficiencies in the delivery of optimal health care. Created in close collaboration with physicians, the result is a user-friendly interface that allows interaction with the system through any method of input; point and click, free text entry, a combination of the two, voice recordings, image drawings, and handwriting. It provides physicians with intuitive usability at varying levels of functionality, based on the physician’s needs and technical comfort. Through the EHMS™, physicians have a secure, effective means of data management. The application enables physicians to provide quality, longitudinal care to patients through the long-term storage of patient information. The EHMS™ incorporates leading edge health information and guidelines released by National and International Health Agencies into discrete disease modules that can be applied to the stored patient information. Based on the patient’s current state of health, past history, family history, physical measurements and medication history, the EHMS™ provides the physician with information and decision support tools at the point of care for the optimal management of patient care. The EHMS™ provides this functionality at no cost to speed and performance, enabling time savings for physicians in their day-to-day activities and therefore, enables them to spend more time with their patients in the provision of optimal care. The bond between a patient and physician is tightly bound by trust - trust that a patient’s information will not be mishandled or mistreated in any way, thereby compromising their confidentiality. Organizations often take a reactive approach to system security rather than a proactive approach; implementing safeguards for information protection after security has been breached. This demands that security should be integrated from the early stages of inception through to the implementation of organizational systems. Prescient’s ERDM™ and e2Sec™ provide organizations and individuals a total end-to-end secure environment. e2Sec™ and ERDM™ surpasses technologies currently on the market by providing an end-to-end secure environment to ensure complete patient and physician security, privacy, and confidentiality from within and beyond the organizations involved. A patient who consents their physician to collect and maintain their data, through the application, can be assured of complete security, privacy and confidentiality using the e2Sec™ and ERDM™. Project 2: Mobile Banking - Implementation of Financial Services Platform (FSP) top Financial Services Platform (FSP) is a revolutionary electronic service that provides immediate, secure, and easy access to financial relationships through a number of Internet enabled devices. It places the end-user’s bank and investment accounts along with information services, all in one place. The intuitive user interface allows end-users to access the services they need, anytime and anywhere. It also provides the ability for end-users to personalize their information preferences. One of primary development goals of FSP was to deliver the financial services on as many devices as possible, enabling our customers to offer their applications to a large number of end-user bases. The applications delivered through FSP were offered on a wide variety of devices through a device agnostic architecture, which also enabled our customer to rapidly render to new devices in a short period of time. Each device selected in the implementation of FSP presented its unique interactive characteristics, with displays of various aspects, capacity, quality and graphic abilities. They also vary in processing power and storage capacity. The following client device types were selected based upon our customer needs:
Palm class of devices The Palm devices supported included: Palm III, IIIe, IIIxe, IIIc, V, Vx, and VII connected organizer, Visor from Handspring with wired or wireless modem, and PDQ (the Qualcomm phone with the Palm OS embedded). The Palm device needed to have at least 2MB of memory and be running the Palm OS v3.0 or greater. Palm III and V series devices accessed the FSP using a Digital PCS phone, which behaved as a wireless digital modem. The Palm devices requested and received application data from the FSP using a custom browser that ran on the Palm OS. The application was essentially a viewer: the User Interface (UI) was data driven and could be changed without recompiling the application. The viewer was a generic display engine, controlled by the application data. Its main responsibilities were to:
Digital Phones Data for the phone clients was sent to and received from the FSP using WAP’s Wireless Markup Language (WML) for Version 3.1 Phone.com browsers, and all Nokia and Ericsson browsers. The FSP also supported the Handheld Device Markup Language (HDML) for lower versions of Phone.com browsers. Pagers Trading, portfolio management, news, and quote services applications were also made available for the RIM 950 Inter@ctive 2-way pagers with BellSouth Powertool software installed. These pagers handled both client requested and alerts functions. HTML Devices All HTML enabled devices were supported for the deployment. Content Services The following Content Services were made available through the FSP: Alerts The Alerts Service managed the tracking of marketing price quotes and other incoming data feeds, and responded to the users requests for information by sending alerts. An alert was defined as a condition specified by a user that resulted in a notification being sent to that user when the condition was fulfilled. Two types of alerts were provided through the FSP; these included:
Quotes Service The Quotes Service managed the customer requests for stock quotes, mutual fund and exchange list information. Charts Service The Charts Service provided security performance charting for specific stocks via server-generated graphics, or time-series data delivered to the client. Portfolio performance charting was dependent on brokerage support. The client request for a security chart was sent directly to the brokerage house or content provider and its response was immediately delivered to the client requesting the information. Chart data was not stored in a database. Lifestyle Services The FSP was also extended to provide a variety of Lifestyle Services that our customers wanted to provide to their end-users. The content was downloaded from the Internet using a data loader and/or from a dedicated content server. The following lifestyle services were deployed in the FSP: News Service This service provided the latest news based on specific themes of news information. Examples of themes included: business news, sports, and international and local/regional news. Weather Service The Weather Service provided daily weather reports for specific cities of the world. Financial Services In addition to the plethora of content services, the objective of the FSP was to enable end-users to access their financial content anytime, anywhere. The financial institutions provided access to Banking and Brokerage content using Open Financial Exchange (OFX). OFX is a unified specification for the electronic exchange of financial data between financial institutions, business, and consumers via the Internet. Accounts This service allowed end-users to view their account details for their bank accounts, via a transaction history. Pay Bills This service enabled end-users to pay a bill that has been registered with their bank, add payees available through the bank, and make post-dated bill payments. Special Orders This service allowed users to order checks, request cash advances, send comments, and make bill payment inquiries. Transfers This service let end-users transfer funds between accounts on the same access card. Investments Accounts This service allowed users to add a portfolio, view a portfolio, view a transaction history, and view the price of a stock, fund, or index. Trading This service enabled end-users to buy, sell, or short-sell stocks listed on major North American exchanges. This service also allowed end-users to view all outstanding orders, and to change or cancel them before they were fulfilled. Project 3: Mobile Banking – Extending the Financial Services Platform for GSM networks top The intent of this project was to deliver banking and life-style services to all GSM mobile subscribers, thus accommodating all phases of the GSM network. The GSM network differs from other wireless – cellular networks in that every mobile handset consists of a smart card known as the Subscriber Identity Module (SIM). With GSM, the phone’s identity is linked not to the handset but rather to the SIM. The SIM provides personal mobility for the subscriber and authenticates the subscriber to the network. Unlike browser-enabled and programmable mobile devices that are used in other cellular networks, GSM mobile equipments are not programmable and do not contain a browser. The SIM card was initially designed to store an encrypted identity key that would authenticate the user to the network. GSM Phase 2 SIM cards were extended to provide the subscriber the ability to store personal information such as phone numbers, abbreviated dialing numbers and other similar features. In order to provide value added services such as banking to the subscriber, the SIM card was extended to be programmable so that applications could be deployed and stored on it. As a result, GSM Phase 2+ specifications introduced the SIM Toolkit Application, which allowed for the programmability of the SIM card. The project catered to all GSM phases and took advantage of two-way SMS messaging. The first phase of the project concentrated in providing services for earlier GSM phones, while the second phase of the project focused in delivering a SIM Toolkit Application for Phase2+ capable mobile phones. For the first phase of the project, the mobile subscribers were required to enter unique Pager Code (PC) commands as their message, which will then be translated by the FSP to execute specific transactions. The user interface was designed to be similar to a text-based interface such as that available on early DOS versions and UNIX operating systems. It was assumed that all mobile users would own a User Card or Sticker Guide that would assist the users with the correct usage of PCs. Since some transactions required the users to enter many parameters and in order to avoid users from typing long messages, a separate self-server website was made available for users to setup their personal preferences. As a result, users were only required to compose short straightforward messages to perform specific transactions. The second phase of the project piggybacked on the first phase of the project and offered similar features. However, the second phase of the project only catered to GSM Phase 2+ users, as it positioned a SIM Toolkit Application. The user interface was menu driven, avoiding the user from memorizing or looking up Pager Codes for specific transactions. The self-serve website was also used for the second as well. Furthermore, the SIM Toolkit Application introduced channel encryption, through the use of symmetric key encryption algorithms DES and 3DES, as these encryption algorithms commonly exist on SIM Phase 2+ cards. Project 4: Architecting and Developing the Next-Generation Mobile Services Platform top The most important design question for mobile and embedded applications is the issue of application architecture: the distribution of both data and function between the client tier (the embedded or mobile device) and the middle tier. In a perfect world, this distribution would be determined by the appropriate logical architecture, determined by considerations such as the need for replication and synchronization of data and sharing of common functions. In practice, the limitations of connectivity are often the largest determining factor in architecting applications today. The application architecture is a crucial decision in creating mobile applications. Models from "occasionally connected" applications (relying on local processing and data storage) to "continuously connected" applications using a Web-like model are possible, but with today's limitations in wireless connectivity, compromises will often be necessary between the ideal availability of the application and the availability of the data it accesses. Keeping in mind the various challenges, Prescient International has designed a Mobile Solution Platform that can support a spectrum of distinct applications, from applications that seek an occasionally connected environment to applications that seek a continuously connected environment, where a mobile user needs access to information on a real-time basis. Prescient Mobile Solution Platform (PMSP) extends the reach of enterprise applications to a wide range of mobile, embedded and distributed devices, connected (either continuously or occasionally) to the enterprise by a variety of wireless communications technologies. By pushing information technology out to the point of customer contact and other "edges" of the organization, solutions built using Prescient’s Mobile Solution Platform will have a dramatic impact on many business processes, enabling organizations to become more responsive, flexible and efficient. Contact Prescient today to discuss how we can help you achieve your Wireless Information Technology goals. |
|
