Usability and Interoperability in Wireless Sensor Networks for Patient Telemonitoring in Chronic Disease Management

This paper addresses two key technological barriers to the wider adoption of patient telemonitoring systems for chronic disease management, namely, usability and sensor device interoperability. As a great percentage of chronic patients are elderly patients as well, usability of the system has to be adapted to their needs. This paper identifies (from previous research) a set of design criteria to address these challenges, and describes the resulting system based on a wireless sensor network, and including a node as a custom-made interface that follows usability design criteria stated. This system has been tested with 22 users (mean age 65) and evaluated with a validated usability questionnaire. Results are good and improve those of other systems based on TV or smartphone. Our results suggest that user interfaces alternative to TVs and smartphones could play an important role on the usability of sensor networks for patient monitoring. Regarding interoperability, only very recently a standard has been published (2010, the ISO IEEE 11073 Personal health devices) that can support the needs of limited computational power environments typical of patient monitoring sensor networks.