Quality-of-Data Management for Telemedicine Systems

This paper describes techniques to manage the quality-of-data (QoD), particularly in telemedicine systems. Hence, clinical data users, such as clinical decision support systems that support ‘real-time’ guidance of ambulatory patients, can process the data together with QoD in order to make the ‘best’ treatment decisions. Current information and communication technology (ICT) applied in telemedicine systems enables remote clinical data collection and delivery to the point of decision, thereby giving opportunities to develop new, pervasive, healthcare applications. However, the QoD in such distributed and decentralized environments is not always guaranteed. We propose QoD management techniques that take into account the multidimensionality of QoD and its ‘fitness for use’. Additionally, we present a technique that handles the quality of ‘real-time’ streaming data. We developed a telemedicine system prototype to investigate the applicability and the usefulness of the proposed techniques.