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.