Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

Systematic Review about QoS and QoE in Telemedicine and eHealth Services and Applications

  • Systems-Level Quality Improvement
  • Published:
Journal of Medical Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The provision of Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) is a mandatory requirement when transmitting telemedicine traffic, due to information relevance to maintain the patient’s health. The main objective of this paper is to present a review of existing research works in the literature, referring to QoS and QoE in telemedicine and eHealth applications. The academic databases that were used to perform the searches are Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, PubMed, Science Direct and Web of Science, taking into account the date of publication from 2008 to the present. These databases cover the most information of scientific texts in multidisciplinary fields, engineering and medicine. Several search criteria were established such as ‘QoS’ AND ‘eHealth’ OR ‘Telemedicine’, ‘QoE’ AND ‘eHealth’ AND ‘Telemedicine’ etc. selecting the items of greatest interest. A total of 248 papers related to QoS and QoE in telemedicine and eHealth have been found, of which 39 papers have been identified as relevant works. The results show that the percentage of studies related to QoS in literature is higher with 74.36% to QoE with 25.64%. From the review of the research articles analyzed, it can be said that QoS and QoE in telemedicine and eHealth are important and necessary factors to guarantee the privacy, reliability, quality and security of data in health care systems.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Ojanpera, T., Uitto, M., and Vehkapera J., QoE-based management of medical video transmission in wireless networks. 2014 IEEE Netw Oper Manag Symp. ;1–6., 2014.

  2. Chorbev, I., and Mihajlov, M., Building a wireless telemedicine network within a WiMax based networking infrastructure. 2009 IEEE Int work Multimed signal process MMSP ‘09. 2009.

  3. Zvikhachevskaya, A., Markarian, G., and Mihaylova, L., Quality of service consideration for the wireless telemedicine and e-health services. IEEE Wirel Commun Netw Conf WCNC. 2009.

  4. Chandy, D., Soto, A., Huerta, M., Bermeo, J.P., Clotet, R., and Sagbay, G., et al., Evaluation of QoS in data mobile network for vital signs transmission. 2016 IEEE Healthc. Innov. Point-of-Care Technol. Conf. HI-POCT. 146–149, 2016.

  5. Edoh, T. O. C., Kora, A. D., Pawar, P., Coulibaly, G. C., and Alahassa, B. R. U., Predicting telemedicine system user satisfaction in sub-Saharan Africa. ICT Express. 2(4):163–167, 2016.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Ullah M, Fiedler M, Wac K. On the ambiguity of quality of service and quality of experience requirements for eHealth services. 2012 6th Int. Symp. Med. Inf. Commun. Technol. ;1–4, 2012.

  7. Lee, J. M., Lee, J. H., and Chung, T. M., Experimental QoS test of medical data over wired and wireless networks. Int. Conf. Adv. Commun. Technol. ICACT. 1:142–146, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Wootton, R., Liu, J., and Bonnardot, L., Relationship between the quality of service provided through store-and-forward telemedicine consultations and the difficulty of the cases – Implications for long-term quality assurance. Front. Public Health 3(217):2–5, 2015.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Negra, R., Jemili, I., and Belghith, A., Wireless body area networks: Applications and technologies. Procedia Comput. Sci. 83:1274–1281, 2016.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Algaet, M. A., Noh, Z. A. B. M., Shibghatullah, A. S., Milad, A. A., and Mustapha, A., Provisioning quality of service of wireless telemedicine for E-health services: A review. Wirel. Pers. Commun. 78(1):375–406, 2014.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Lin, D., Labeau, F., and Vasilakos, A. V., QoE-based optimal resource allocation in wireless healthcare networks: Opportunities and challenges. Wirel. Netw 21(8):2483–2500, 2015.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Nasralla, M. M., Razaak, M., Rehman, I. U., and Martini, M. G., Content-aware packet scheduling strategy for medical ultrasound videos over LTE wireless networks. Comput. Netw. 140:126–137, 2018.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Mukhopadhyay, A., QoS based telemedicine technologies for rural healthcare emergencies. GHTC 2017 - IEEE Glob Humanit. Technol. Conf. Proc. ;1–7, 2017.

  14. Fourati, H., Idoudi, H., and Saidane, L. A., Intelligent slots allocation for dynamic differentiation in IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA. Ad Hoc Netw. 72:27–43, 2018.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Akbar, M. S., Yu, H., and Cang, S. T. M. P., Tele-Medicine Protocol for Slotted 802.15.4 With Duty-Cycle Optimization in Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks. IEEE Sensors J. 17(6):1925–1936, 2017.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  16. Almashaqbeh, G., Hayajneh, T., Vasilakos, A. V., and Mohd, B. J., QoS-aware health monitoring system using cloud-based WBANs. J. Med. Syst. 38(10):121, 2014.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  17. Liao, Y., Leeson, M. S., and Higgins, M. D., Flexible quality of service model for wireless body area sensor networks. Healthc. Technol. Lett. 3(1):12–15, 2016.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  18. Loya, S. R., Kawamoto, K., Chatwin, C., and Huser, V., Service oriented architecture for clinical decision support: A systematic review and future directions. J. Med. Syst. 38(12):140, 2014.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  19. Tung, H.Y., Lam, K.L., Hancke, G.P., and Lee, C.C., Service management for convergent automation network supporting health and sustainable applications. 39th Annu Conf Ind Electron Soc IECON. ;8454–8459, 2013.

  20. Bertolino, A., De Angelis, G., Di Marco, A., Inverardi, P., Sabetta, A., and Tivoli M. A Framework for analyzing and testing the performance of software services. International symposium on leveraging applications of formal methods, verification and validation. ;206–220, 2008.

  21. Martinez, I., Garcia, J., and Viruete, E.A., Resources variability in m-health services: an adaptive method for QoS control. 2008 5th IEEE Consum Commun. Netw. Conf CCNC. 829–833, 2008.

  22. Saxena, N., Roy, A., and Shin, J., Dynamic duty cycle and adaptive contention window based QoS-MAC protocol for wireless multimedia sensor networks. Comput. Netw. 52(13):2532–2542, 2008.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Liu CH, Chen JT, Wu CM, Chen CL. The analysis for the auxiliary telemedicine system QoS. NCM 2009 - 5th Int Jt Conf INC, IMS, IDC. 9;1546–1551, 2009.

  24. Zambrano, A., Huerta, M., Diaz, M., Andrade M De, Marchena P. Quality of Service Evaluation of Telemedicine Network Design with IEEE 802.11b Technology World Congr Med. Phys. Biomed. Eng. ;218–221, 2009.

  25. Barua, M., Alam, M.S., Liang, X., and Shen, X., Secure and quality of service assurance scheduling scheme for WBAN with application to eHealth. 2011 IEEE Wirel. Commun. Netw. Conf. WCNC. ;1102–1106, 2011.

  26. He, Y., Zhu, W., and Guan, L., Optimal resource allocation for pervasive health monitoring systems with body sensor networks. IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. 10(11):1558–1575, 2011.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Adibi, S., Biomedical sensing analyzer (BSA) for mobile-health (mHealth)-LTE. IEEE J. Biomed. Heal. Inform. 18(1):345–351, 2014.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Fang, Y., Wu, Z., Jiang, L., and Sun, Y., Performance evaluation of RAKE receiver for ultra-wideband wireless body area network communication. Int. Conf. Signal Process. Proc ICSP. ;2257–2261, 2014.

  29. Swiatek, P., Juszczyszyn, K., Kolaczek, G., Brzostowski, K., and Schauer, P., Processes’ optimization tools for web-service oriented organizations’ resources - an ehealth application. 2015 17th Int. Conf. E-Health Networking, Appl. Serv. Heal. ;222–226, 2015.

  30. Agirre, A., Parra, J., Armentia, A., Ghoneim, A., Estévez, E., and Marcos, M., QoS management for dependable sensory environments. Multimed. Tools Appl. 75(21):13397–13419, 2016.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Berrio, F.E.A., and Gomez, N.G., Queue occupation-based RED with adaptive control for telemedicine traffic. 2016 IEEE Colomb Conf Commun Comput COLCOM - Conf proc. 2016.

  32. Boussada R, Elhdhili ME, Saidane LA. QoS enabled privacy preserving solution for eHealth systems. 5th IFIP Int Conf Perform Eval Model Wired Wirel Networks, PEMWN. 2016.

  33. El Kalam, A. A., Ferreira, A., and Kratz, F., Bilateral teleoperation system using QoS and secure communication networks for telemedicine applications. IEEE Syst. J. 10(2):709–720, 2016.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Parsaei, M. R., Mohammadi, R., and Javidan, R., A new adaptive traffic engineering method for telesurgery using ACO algorithm over software defined networks. Eur. Res. Telemed. 6(3–4):173–180, 2017.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Ronga, L. S., Jayousi, S., Aragno, C., Bagni, M., Carniato, L., and Fongher, F., Satellite integrated heterogeneous architecture for professional health services. IET Commun. 12(1):9–17, 2017.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Balakrishnan M, Han D, Benhaddou D, Yuan X. End-to-end QoS in integrated wireless and sensor network: System implementation. 2010 7th Int. Symp. Commun. Syst. Netw. Digit. Signal Process.886–889, 2010.

  37. Varela, M., Mäki, T., Merilahti, J., and Rodríguez, E. R., Runge a. QuoTe an extensible platform for QoE monitoring and benchmarking of telemedicine applications. IEEE 16th Int. Conf. e-Health Networking, Appl. Serv. Heal. 2014:61–65, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  38. Martínez-Pérez B, De La Torre-Díez I, Candelas-Plasencia S, López-Coronado M. Development and evaluation of tools for measuring the quality of experience (QoE) in mHealth applications. J. Med. Syst. 2013;37(5):9976.

  39. Rojas-Mendizabal, V. A., Serrano-Santoyo, A., Conte-Galvan, R., and Gomez-Gonzalez, A., Toward a model for quality of experience and quality of service in e-health ecosystems. Proc. Technol. 9:968–974, 2013.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Martínez-Pérez, B., de la Torre-Díez, I., and López-Coronado, M., Experiences and results of applying tools for assessing the quality of a mHealth app named Heartkeeper. J. Med. Syst. 39(11):142, 2015.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  41. Varga, N., Piri, E., and Bokor, L., Network-assisted smart access point selection for pervasive real-time mHealth applications. Proc. Comput. Sci. 63:317–324, 2015.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Souihi, S., Souidi, M., Mellouk, A., An adaptive QoE-based network Interface selection for multi-homed eHealth devices. In: International internet of things summit. ;437–442, 2016.

  43. Cavaro-Ménard, C., Zhang-Geb, L., and Callet P Le. QoE for telemedicine: Challenges and trends. Appl Digit Image Process XXXVI Int Soc Opt Photonics. ;8856, 2013.

  44. Koutsakis, P., Scheduling for telemedicine traffic transmission over WLANs. Comput. Commun. 108:17–26, 2017.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Yew, H. T., Kheau, C. S., Chin, R. K. Y., Chekima, A., and Satria, M. H., Improved-TOPSIS based handover scheme for telemedicine service using heterogeneous wireless networks. IEEE 2nd Int. Conf. Autom. Control Intell. Syst. 2017:155–160, 2017.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research has been made within the Program “Movilidad Investigadores UVA-BANCO SANTANDER 2018”, and it has been partially supported by European Commission and the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism under the project AAL-20125036 named “Wetake Care: ICT- based Solution for (Self-) Management of Daily Living”.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Isabel de la Torre Díez.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Additional information

This article is part of the Topical Collection on Systems-Level Quality Improvement

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

de la Torre Díez, I., Alonso, S.G., Hamrioui, S. et al. Systematic Review about QoS and QoE in Telemedicine and eHealth Services and Applications. J Med Syst 42, 182 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-018-1040-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-018-1040-4

Keywords

Navigation