Elderly comfort and compliance to modern telemedicine system at home

The success of integration and adaptation of pervasive computing and telemedicine technology in healthcare depends on the patients' compliance and trust to the introduced system. The aims of the present paper are to investigate, verify and evaluate the elderly heart patients' (EHP) compliance, trust and comfort in relation to a real-time wireless telemedicine system at home. A telemedicine system composed of a patient-unit, a GSM/GPRS network, a router, a data interpreter and a monitoring system was used. Twenty four non risky EHPs, aged (60plusmn5) years were recruited. A week of continuous ECGs for each of the EHPs were recorded. The experiments were carried out while the EHPs were performing their every day's activities. The EHPs' compliance, trust and comfort was verified and evaluated by three questionnaires. In average, 52% of the EHPs scored the user-friendly and usability of the system as reasonable. Only 16% sought help from the healthcare personnel in respect with the application of the patient-unit. 76% scored the reliability of the system as "reasonable" and 20% as "only now and then". It is concluded that the present system is reliable, functions with a clinically acceptable performance. The EHPs have expressed reasonable compliance and trust to the application of the system at home; however a number of the elderly were not satisfied with the weight and the user-interface of the ECG device.