Transmission delay performance in telemedicine: A case study

Given the prevalence of chronic health conditions, such as diabetes, obesity, epilepsy, and cardiovascular diseases, telemedicine technologies are increasingly adopted to help patients better manage their care and treat these diseases at home. These emerging telemedicine systems have been deployed and tested in a number of different health programs and hospitals. However, due to the lack of dedicated and reliable networking infrastructure, achieving real-time data collection is very challenging task. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis on the delay issues presented during the use of a store and forward telemonitoring system for congestive heart failure patients in urban Philadelphia. Results from this analysis reveal that 10.3% of the patient measurements experience delays of longer than 12 hours. Delays of up to several days occurred in 15.38% these patients who went on to be hospitalized. These delay issues exposed from urban scale real systems have direct impact on the quality of remote health care, causing late diagnosis and intervention especially when patients are experiencing acute exacerbations. Our investigation results essentially call for regulations on telemedicine systems with an emphasis on their temporal constraints.