Ph.D Year 1: Transfer Report (RD5) Towards a Patient Simulator Framework for Evaluation of e-Health Environments: Modeling, Techniques, Validation and Implementation

TRADITIONALLY, record keeping of patient data within a healthcare environment has been conducted using paper based systems. With the exponential growth in modern technology, electronic systems and highly sophisticated medical devices have started replacing this traditional method. Furthermore, with the Internet now a common everyday commodity in most developed parts of the world, the healthcare industry has began migrating their systems to take advantages of modern communication infrastructures. Known as e-Health, this concept is the delivery of healthcare services on amass scale. It enables cross-communication of medical data alongwith the delivery of health care services straight from the Internet itself. No longer are healthcare records isolated as e-Health enables the sharing of medical data from all facilities, from the largest hospitals to the smallest drop-in clinics, using distributed computing techniques such as cloud computing. However, with the growth in the development of e-Health, including both platforms and services, the issue of how to evaluate these patient centric environments remains unanswered. Privacy of Data laws make it difficult to use real patient data, whilst live deployment of e-Health environments require overcoming many more legal and ethical requirements. Thus, in this report, it is proposed that the research and development of a patient simulator framework using computer based simulation techniques enables the evaluation of e-Health environments under some early defined metrics including efficiency, reliability, security and scalability. As part of this report, the main aim and objectives of this work is outlined along with a comprehensive literature review of relevant subjects. The proposed novelty of this framework is presented and future work to be conducted is outlined.