Proposal of A Lightweight, Offline, Full-Text Search Engine For An Mhealth App

A patient’s ability to recall and retrieve health infor- mation contributes to a better health management. HealthTalks was developed to address these issues by recording a summary of a medical appointment, uttered by the physician, and tran- scribing it. For each appointment, the user can also take free-text notes. Nowadays, search engines have become a ubiquitous part of everyone’s life and are expected on most applications. Here, we describe the development of a search engine for HealthTalks. The app’s characteristics demand a lightweight and offline engine, which requires a specific solution rather than an existing library or service. Our approach combines SQLite’s Full-Text Search 5 module, which includes n-gram indexing, with traditional information retrieval techniques to rank the documents. We expect this work to be useful for future developments of full- text search engines in mobile environments.