A Framework for a Smart Social Blood Donation System Based on Mobile Cloud Computing

Blood Donation and Blood Transfusion Services (BTS) are crucial for saving people’s lives. Recently, worldwide efforts have been undertaken to utilize social media and smartphone applications to make the blood donation process more convenient, offer additional services, and create communities around blood donation centers. Blood banks suffer frequent shortage of blood; hence, advertisements are frequently seen on social networks urging healthy individuals to donate blood for patients who urgently require blood transfusion. The blood donation process usually consumes a lot of time and effort from both donors and medical staff since there is no concrete information system that allows donors and blood donation centers communicate efficiently and coordinate with each other to minimize time and effort required for blood donation process. Moreover, most blood banks work in isolation and are not integrated with other blood donation centers and health organizations which affect the blood donation and blood transfusion services’ quality. This work aims at developing a Blood Donation System (BDS) based on the cutting-edge information technologies of cloud computing and mobile computing. The proposed system facilitates communication between blood donors and blood donation centers and integrates the blood information dispersed among different blood donation centers and health organizations across a country. Stakeholders will be able to use the BDS as an application installed on their smartphones to help them complete the blood donation process with minimal effort and time. This application helps people receive notifications on urgent blood donation calls, know their eligibility to give blood, search for the nearest blood center, and reserve a convenient appointment using temporal and/or spatial information. It also helps establish a blood donation community through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.