Interoperability-based standards for sensor enhanced health information systems

Abstract

This research work focuses on examining, analysing and classifying the difficulties of using sensors to improve the working standards of systems that are used in healthcare commonly referred to as Healthcare Information Systems. This constitutes an active research area because the cost of healthcare services is rising and the world population is growing older (population aging) whose need for HIS is paramount. Quite a number of researchers are investigating how to use sensors in order to provide healthcare services efficaciously and how to monitor healthcare systems remotely. A major challenge affecting integrating sensors in healthcare is interoperability, and in order to address this issue in the present environment where devices are expected to interact with each other more smoothly in what is popularly known as ‘the internet of things’, Interoperability as a Property (IaaP) has been proposed as a new paradigm. In this thesis, the enabling factors (or criteria) for Interoperability as a Property of a system (IaaP) were refined and a framework based on IaaP was proposed. To pave the way for further investigation, experimental scenarios for implementing each enabling criteria was examined, where environmental temperature was simulated as the Independent Variable (IV) and blood pressure was simulated as the dependent variable (DV). DEMATEL (DEcision-MAking Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) was used as a multiple-criteria decision analysis method to identify the interdependence among IaaP enabling criteria. Furthermore, DEMATEL was used to categorize IaaP enabling criteria as either being part of the causal or the effect group. Multi-criteria decision making results show that Intelligence Criteria (INT) constitute the most important IaaP enabling criteria followed by Communication Criteria (COM), the least important being Trace Criteria (TRC). Evaluation of results indicates that the IaaP framework constitutes a useful approach for bridging the interoperability gap in HIS. The contribution of the research lies with the effect of the main interoperable criteria for the huge amount of devices that are connected to the internet, it is outrageously difficult for device to smoothly interoperate, but Intelligence Criteria as well as the other criteria have been able to efficiently make interoperability possible. Even though a lot of research has been conducted with the aim of making devices used in HIS more interoperable, interoperability remains a challenge to most healthcare providers. In this research, interoperability as a property of a system is further confirmed to dwells on seven enabling requirements. All the seven requirements are used as building blocks for ‘Interoperability as a Property Framework’ (IaaPF). In addition to the medical sensory data, IaaPF should be able to receive other useful signals from sensors in its vicinity.