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

J Med Syst. 2018 Aug 29;42(10):182. doi: 10.1007/s10916-018-1040-4.

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.

Keywords: QoE; QoS; Review; Telemedicine; eHealth.

Publication types

  • Review
  • Systematic Review

MeSH terms

  • Databases, Factual*
  • Delivery of Health Care*
  • Humans
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Telemedicine*