Telemonitoring is a branch of telehealth that aims at remotely monitoring vital signs, which is important for chronically ill patients and the elderly living alone. The available standalone devices and applications for the selfmonitoring of health parameters largely suffer from interoperability problems; meanwhile, telemonitoring medical devices are expensive, self-contained, and are not integrated into user-friendly technological platforms for the end user. This paper presents the technical aspects and usability assessment of the telemonitoring features of the HEREiAM platform, which supports heterogeneous information technology systems. By exploiting a service-oriented architecture, the measured parameters collected by off-the-shelf Bluetooth medical devices are sent as XML documents to a private cloud that implements an interoperable health service infrastructure, which is compliant with the most recent healthcare standards and security protocols. This Androidbased system is designed to be accessible both via TV and portable devices, and includes other utilities designed to support the elderly living alone. Four usability assessment sessions with quality-validated questionnaires were performed to accurately understand the ease of use, usefulness, acceptance, and quality of the proposed system. The results reveal that our system achieved very high usability scores even at its first use, and the scores did not significantly change over time during a field trial that lasted for four months, reinforcing the idea of an intuitive design.
Telemonitoring is nowadays one of the most sought-after approach for patient management, especially for those suffering from chronic conditions. It involves different actors and exploits various technologies for monitoring patients at distance. In this paper, a telemonitoring framework specifically designed for elderly patients is presented. The proposed system takes advantage of an Android application that can be used on different devices (smartphone, tablet and TV), for the measurement of vital signs. The general practitioners have access to a simple and intuitive web interface to monitor the patients’ parameters trend and send them feedback. Preliminary usability tests have been carried out, with satisfying results, both with elderly patients and with general practitioners
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