Design of a decision support system using open source software for a home telehealth application

This article presents a decision support system (DSS) that has been designed to manage patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) using a home telehealth system. The DSS has been developed to assist home telehealth clinical support staff with their workload, and to provide more effective communication between multiple home telehealth users. The three-tier system architecture that consists of a data layer; a business logic layer; and a front-end layer employs a business process model and uses a rule engine for its logic and knowledge base. This paper discusses the design considerations involved in the construction of a DSS for the purpose of home telehealth, and illustrates how it may be developed using entirely open source software.