The Capabilities and Requirements of Elderly Tele-Health Monitoring System

Telehealth management systems for elderly people should have the features, capabilities, and infrastructure that meet the diverse needs of home care management. Since there is no valid and reliable questionnaire to determine these requirements, the main purpose of this study was to determine the requirements of a tele-health monitoring system for elderly people and to present it as a valid and reliable questionnaire.

This study was a descriptive-analytical one that performed in 2019. Questionnaire items were obtained from a systematic review study. For the review phase, the selected keywords such as elderly, home care, telecare, telehealth, and information technology from 2013 to October 2019 were searched on selected databases.

Based on the findings of this study, the parameters and requirements of tele-health monitoring system for elderly people were identified in 97 items. Furthermore, the first 31 items of the questionnaire were removed due to low validity and reliability. In the next phase, the final questionnaire with 66 items, content validity ratio of 99%, Cronbachchr('39')s alpha coefficient (0.9) and desirable correlation coefficient (r = 0.85, p-value <0.05) were designed.

In this study, the requirements of tele-health monitoring system for elderly people were determined and a valid and reliable questionnaire was developed using these requirements. The questionnaire was designed in five parts: applications, functional requirements, non-functional requirements, tools, and communication infrastructure. The results of the present study can be used by health care system designers to determine the applications and requirements of elderly health monitoring systems.