Search Results (9)

Background/Objective: Healthcare accessibility remains a critical challenge in medically underserved regions, particularly for specialized care such as trauma treatment and hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). This study aims to develop and empirically evaluate the Dr. LINK platform, a remote collaborative care system designed to bridge healthcare gaps in geographically isolated or resource-limited areas through real-time interdisciplinary medical collaboration. Methods: Dr. LINK platform employs a SaaS-based infrastructure with Zero Trust security architecture, supporting structured data exchange, automated notifications, and dynamic consultation transfer. Patients completed a modified Telehealth Usability Questionnaire on a 7-point Likert scale, evaluating usefulness, ease of use, interface quality, interaction quality, reliability, and overall satisfaction. Results: Dr. LINK successfully facilitated real-time collaborative consultations for emergency medicine and HBOT, supporting multiple concurrent consultations while maintaining data security and system performance. Overall usability scores were high (mean 6.71–6.83/7), with HBOT patients consistently reporting higher satisfaction across all domains. The platform enabled timely, structured, and coordinated care, reducing unnecessary patient transfers and enhancing multidisciplinary decision-making. Conclusions: Dr. LINK represents a significant advancement in addressing healthcare disparities by enabling structured, secure, and scalable remote collaborative care. The platform effectively overcomes geographic and infrastructural barriers, providing a practical framework for future telemedicine implementations in specialized care domains. Continued refinement and evaluation will be essential to fully realize its potential in transforming healthcare delivery models toward greater equity and accessibility. Full article

Telemedicine has the potential to support healthy aging in older adults; however, many applications fail to consider their specific needs and preferences, resulting in a limited number of effective options. This study systematically reviews the existing literature on interface design elements, attempts to link the elements with a Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), evaluates their usability for the elderly population, and highlights the social sustainability of telemedicine systems. A comprehensive search was conducted across the Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, and CINAHL databases to identify existing research pertaining to the factors influencing usability, evaluation methodologies, and recommendations for telemedicine interfaces specifically designed for older adults. A total of 41 studies were analyzed, yielding a comprehensive summary of research methodologies and interface design elements from four key dimensions: the functional framework, interaction logic, visual design, and user experience. Our analysis identified prevalent usability challenges and provided actionable recommendations. Although the majority of studies focused on existing applications and usability testing, there was a notable gap in research addressing the cognitive and emotional needs of older users. Furthermore, many studies fell short in offering a comprehensive and detailed examination of design elements relevant to this user group. Based on the existing literature, this paper summarizes interface design elements suitable for elderly users, offering insights into user experience and usability. This study provides guidance for the interface design and development of telemedicine for old adults, offers suggestions on interface usability for practitioners in the medical industry, and also provides a reference value for the government in formulating relevant medical policies and for entrepreneurs in making investments. Full article

This work presents a configurable Internet of Things architecture for acoustical sensing and analysis for frequent remote respiratory assessments. The proposed system creates a foundation for enabling real-time therapy and patient feedback adjustment in a telemedicine setting. By allowing continuous remote respiratory monitoring, the system has the potential to give clinicians access to assessments from which they could make decisions about modifying therapy in real-time and communicate changes directly to patients. The system comprises a wearable wireless microphone array interfaced with a programmable microcontroller with embedded signal conditioning. Experiments on the phantom model were conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of reconstructing acoustic lung images for detecting obstructions in the airway and provided controlled validation of noise resilience and imaging capabilities. An optimized denoising technique and design innovations provided 7 dB more SNR and 7% more imaging accuracy for the proposed system, benchmarked against digital stethoscopes. While further clinical studies are warranted, initial results suggest potential benefits over single-point digital stethoscopes for internet-enabled remote lung monitoring needing noise immunity and regional specificity. The flexible architecture aims to bridge critical technical gaps in frequent and connected respiratory function at home or in busy clinical settings challenged by ambient noise interference. Full article

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurological progressive movement disorder, affecting more than 10 million people globally. PD demands a longitudinal assessment of symptoms to monitor the disease progression and manage the treatments. Existing assessment methods require patients with PD (PwPD) to visit a clinic every 3–6 months to perform movement assessments conducted by trained clinicians. However, periodic visits pose barriers as PwPDs have limited mobility, and healthcare cost increases. Hence, there is a strong demand for using telemedicine technologies for assessing PwPDs in remote settings. In this work, we present an in-home telemedicine kit, named iTex (intelligent Textile), which is a patient-centered design to carry out accessible tele-assessments of movement symptoms in people with PD. iTex is composed of a pair of smart textile gloves connected to a customized embedded tablet. iTex gloves are integrated with flex sensors on the fingers and inertial measurement unit (IMU) and have an onboard microcontroller unit with IoT (Internet of Things) capabilities including data storage and wireless communication. The gloves acquire the sensor data wirelessly to monitor various hand movements such as finger tapping, hand opening and closing, and other movement tasks. The gloves are connected to a customized tablet computer acting as an IoT device, configured to host a wireless access point, and host an MQTT broker and a time-series database server. The tablet also employs a patient-centered interface to guide PwPDs through the movement exam protocol. The system was deployed in four PwPDs who used iTex at home independently for a week. They performed the test independently before and after medication intake. Later, we performed data analysis of the in-home study and created a feature set. The study findings reported that the iTex gloves were capable to collect movement-related data and distinguish between pre-medication and post-medication cases in a majority of the participants. The IoT infrastructure demonstrated robust performance in home settings and offered minimum barriers for the assessment exams and the data communication with a remote server. In the post-study survey, all four participants expressed that the system was easy to use and poses a minimum barrier to performing the test independently. The present findings indicate that the iTex glove system has the potential for periodic and objective assessment of PD motor symptoms in remote settings. Full article

Improved life expectancy is increasing the number of older adults who suffer from motor-cognitive decline. Unfortunately, conventional balance exercise programs are not tailored to patients with cognitive impairments, and exercise adherence is often poor due to unsupervised settings. This study describes the acceptability and feasibility of a sensor-based in-home interactive exercise system, called tele-Exergame, used by older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or dementia. Our tele-Exergame is specifically designed to improve balance and cognition during distractive conditioning while a telemedicine interface remotely supervises the exercise, and its exercises are gamified balance tasks with explicit augmented visual feedback. Fourteen adults with MCI or dementia (Age = 68.1 ± 5.4 years, 12 females) participated and completed exergame twice weekly for six weeks at their homes. Before and after 6 weeks, participants’ acceptance was assessed by Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) questionnaire, and participants’ cognition and anxiety level were evaluated by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), respectively. Results support acceptability, perceived benefits, and positive attitudes toward the use of the system. The findings of this study support the feasibility, acceptability, and potential benefit of tele-Exergame to preserve cognitive function among older adults with MCI and dementia. Full article

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted the use of telemedicine application (apps), which has seen an uprise. This study evaluated the usability of the user interface design of telemedicine apps deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic in Saudi Arabia. It also explored changes to the apps’ usability based on the pandemic timeline. Methods: We screened ten mHealth apps published by the National Digital Transformation Unit and selected three telemedicine apps: (1) governmental “Seha”^® app, (2) stand-alone “Cura”^® app, and (3) private “Dr. Sulaiman Alhabib”^®app. We conducted the evaluations in April 2020 and in June 2021 by identifying positive app features, using Nielsen’s ten usability heuristics with a five-point severity rating scale, and documenting redesign recommendations. Results: We identified 54 user interface usability issues during both evaluation periods: 18 issues in “Seha” 14 issues in “Cura”, and 22 issues in “Dr. Sulaiman Alhabib”. The two most heuristic items violated in “Seha”, were “user control and freedom” and “recognition rather than recall”. In “Cura”, the three most heuristic items violated were “consistency and adherence to standards”, “esthetic and minimalist design”, and “help and documentation” In “Dr. Sulaiman Alhabib” the most heuristic item violated was “error prevention”. Ten out of the thirty usability issues identified from our first evaluation were no longer identified during our second evaluation. Conclusions: our findings indicate that all three apps have a room for improving their user interface designs to improve the overall user experience and to ensure the continuity of these services beyond the pandemic. Full article

Preventive care and telemedicine are expected to play an important role in reducing the impact of an increasingly aging global population while increasing the number of healthy years. Virtual coaching is a promising research area to support this process. This paper presents a user-centered virtual coach for older adults at home to promote active and healthy aging and independent living. It supports behavior change processes for improving on cognitive, physical, social interaction and nutrition areas using specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-limited (SMART) goal plans, following the I-Change behavioral change model. Older adults select and personalize which goal plans to join from a catalog designed by domain experts. Intervention delivery adapts to user preferences and minimizes intrusiveness in the user’s daily living using a combination of a deterministic algorithm and incremental machine learning model. The home becomes an augmented reality environment, using a combination of projectors, cameras, microphones and support sensors, where common objects are used for projection and sensed. Older adults interact with this virtual coach in their home in a natural way using speech and body gestures on projected user interfaces with common objects at home. This paper presents the concept from the older adult and the caregiver perspectives. Then, it focuses on the older adult view, describing the tools and processes available to foster a positive behavior change process, including a discussion about the limitations of the current implementation. Full article

Pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) and omnidirectional cameras serve as a video-mediated communication interface for telemedicine. Most cases use either PTZ or omnidirectional cameras exclusively; even when used together, images from the two are shown separately on 2D displays. Conventional foveated imaging techniques may offer a solution for exploiting the benefits of both cameras, i.e., the high resolution of the PTZ camera and the wide field-of-view of the omnidirectional camera, but displaying the unified image on a 2D display would reduce the benefit of “omni-” directionality. In this paper, we introduce a foveated imaging pipeline designed to support virtual reality head-mounted displays (HMDs). The pipeline consists of two parallel processes: one for estimating parameters for the integration of the two images and another for rendering images in real time. A control mechanism for placing the foveal region (i.e., high-resolution area) in the scene and zooming is also proposed. Our evaluations showed that the proposed pipeline achieved, on average, 17 frames per second when rendering the foveated view on an HMD, and showed angular resolution improvement on the foveal region compared with the omnidirectional camera view. However, the improvement was less significant when the zoom level was 8× and more. We discuss possible improvement points and future research directions. Full article

The hip joint is highly prone to traumatic and degenerative pathologies resulting in irregular locomotion. Monitoring and treatment depend on high-end technology facilities requiring physician and patient co-location, thus limiting access to specialist monitoring and treatment for populations living in rural and remote locations. Telemedicine offers an alternative means of monitoring, negating the need for patient physical presence. In addition, emerging technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and immersive technologies, offer potential future solutions through virtual presence, where the patient and health professional can meet in a virtual environment (a virtual clinic). To this end, a prototype asynchronous telemedicine VR gait analysis system was designed, aiming to transfer a full clinical facility within the patients’ local proximity. The proposed system employs cost-effective alternative motion capture combined with the system’s immersive 3D virtual gait analysis clinic. The user interface and the tools in the application offer health professionals asynchronous, objective, and subjective analyses. This paper investigates the requirements for the design of such a system and discusses preliminary comparative data of its performance evaluation against a high-fidelity gait analysis clinical application. Full article