Abstract
Tourists with chronic diseases, being afraid of unexpected emergency situation, might be less motivated to travel to remote destinations due to their health concerns, particularly while on the move. Smartphone, sensor devices, cellular communication, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are recent technologies that provide new mobile location based services. Such services could help mobile tourists, i.e. tourist who is currently moving between various sites, to get innovative set of services which make their trip easier and safer. Designing efficient solutions that help tourists with chronic diseases to find an appropriate geographical route from a source to a tourism destination through a transportation network is crucial to healthcare systems. This paper proposes a new approach in generating geographical routes that are best served with close medical centers. Our approach, called Geographical Routing for Mobile Tourist (GRMT), selects a route that is best served with medical centers, and goes through the path that is as shortest as possible in regards with the distance. We have modeled and simulated the proposed approach using simulation program. Simulated experimental results show that GRMT allows tourists to select geographical routes that are served with the highest number of close medical centers although the selected route is slightly longer in distance.
•An IoT architecture connecting a health-worrier tourist to nearby healthcare centers is introduced.•An approach to find a geographical route that is best served with healthcare centers is proposed.•An analytical model for weighing various available geographical routes is presented.•Routes weighing is based on closeness, speciality, and number of nearby healthcare centers.•The efficiency of the proposed approach in overcoming tourists travel constraints was evaluated via simulation.