Evaluation metrics for ehealth services and applications within smart houses context

Abstract

eHealth services is a continuously growing sector, driving the need for advances in both the network characteristics and infrastructure, as well as in the available mobile devices used. The same need requires the development of quality software applications to facilitate and service eHealth activities. On these grounds, this paper proposes a novel evaluation methodology that takes into consideration the peculiarities of sensor/actuator related services. It further focuses on aspects of software quality for eHealth services and applications, and identifies a set of quality characteristics and attributes to take into consideration. These quality characteristics are integrated into our proposed evaluation methodology during the analysis and engineering phases, which is a revised version of the spiral software process used in web engineering. The efficacy of the proposed approach in a real scenario is discussed. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.