Sharing Is Caring: a Data Exchange Framework for Co-located Mobile Apps

Data sharing between mobile apps that are co-located in a smartphone may lead to synergistic benefits to the user especially in the health-care domain. Mobile apps that monitor and control user behavior can interact to engage the user into a healthy schedule over a long term. In the current app development paradigm, apps are being developed individually and agnostic of each other. To enable interaction between apps in secure manner, collaboration between developers is needed, which can be problematic on many levels. Current approaches to app integration require large code modifications to reap the benefits of shared data such as requiring developers to provide APIs or ensuring security through elaborate measures. In order to promote app interaction, this paper proposes a non-invasive secure interface for data sharing between mobile apps. A separate app, called the Health-Dev data manager, acts as a registry to allow apps to register database tables to be shared. Two health monitoring apps are developed to evaluate the sharing framework and different methods of data integration between apps. The health monitoring apps have shown non-invasive solutions can provide data sharing functionality without large code modifications and collaboration between developers.