Patient sensors: A data quality perspective

Abstract

Wireless sensor devices with communication capabilities are affected by data quality issues. To ensure that information transmitted by these sensing devices are of a high quality, the data needs to be processed, validated and verified to meet the data quality requirements of the end user. The sensor validation component of the Data Management System (DMS) architecture is presented. It is designed to identify if the real-time sensor is functioning within the correct operating bounds. The DMS is applied within a medical environment to assess its ability to manage real-time patient sensor readings. The effectiveness of the DMS-Validation Model (DMS-VM) is evaluated under two real world scenarios 1) Hardware variance among four Tyndall-DMS-Motes with a patient state of resting and 2) One Tyndall-DMS-Mote under three patient states. The experiments have shown the reliability of the Tyndall-DMS-Mote and the ability of the DMS-VM to ensure sensor data quality. Validating sensor reliability is essential to enable safe remote health monitoring in the home. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.