Information quality and data management within a pervasive medical environment

Abstract

Next generation pervasive medical domains will be made up of numerous quantities of autonomous: processing, communicating and sensing devices. These may include personal digital assistants (PDA) wireless sensor networks (WSN) or of a patient centric importance, Body Area Networks (BAN). Before any data management task may be executed, the context or situation of the user and their environment needs to be taken into account. This large paradigm shift from centralised decision making networks to remote autonomy create new challenges within the information quality community, particularly how to collect, correlate and disseminate this new information pool in an intelligent manner. Presented in this paper are the findings of the Data Management System-Data Consistency Model (DMS-DCM) software architecture within a pervasive medical environment. Five data management experiments were conducted to evaluate the DMS DCM’s effect on information quality.