Making medical treatments resilient to technological disruptions in telemedicine systems

Abstract

Telemedicine depends on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to support remote treatment of patients. This dependency requires the telemedicine system design to be resilient for ICT performance degradation or subsystem failures. Nevertheless, using telemedicine systems create a dependency between medical and technological concerns. We propose a layering technique that links medical and technological concerns by using a two-staged scenario based requirements elicitation method. This layering technique provides functional relations between technological variables (e.g. raw ECG signal) and their technological context (e.g. measurements conditions), clinical variables (e.g. heart rate), and clinical abstractions (e.g. physical exercise target heart rate) and the non-functional quality of data relations between the layers. We use a hierarchical ontology to specify these functional and nonfunctional relations, which enables the development of technological context and quality-aware telemedicine systems that are able to cope with technological disruptions whilst preserving patient safety.