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Because of the enormous impact of the aforementioned conditions, there have been
efforts [16], [26], [47] to guide the patient's diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring
outside clinics in a way that health-related issues can be efficiently manipulated and
used in a timely manner, since time and space constitute barriers between health care
providers and their patients, and indeed, among health care providers themselves. One
of these directions has been to empower the patient to become a stakeholder in the
management of pain. Moreover, bearing in mind the need for an anywhere, anytime
connection for medical information access, a more flexible and mobile telemedicine
system could be developed that would be able to overcome the current health-related
information limitations discussed so far. This is precisely what we address in this
work, and describe our experiences with the design of a PDA-based solution for mo-
bile data collection of 3-D pain data.
2.7 Summary
To date, there is no standard procedure for collecting and assessing back pain related
medical information. Currently, the healthcare industry is investing a lot of money
and resources in identifying ways for the prevention and monitoring of chronic dis-
eases, one of which is back pain. However, by reviewing the current literature, we
have seen that the existing back pain assessment methods cannot be considered ade-
quate in providing the best quality treatment for back pain patients. Current statistics
regarding the numbers of back pain sufferers, as well as the expenses in terms of
money and resources, demonstrate that such methods do not provide an effective
solution to this worldwide chronic phenomenon, as they do not overcome the limita-
tions identified regarding their ability to effectively visualize pain and store it for
further analysis, in the case of pain drawings. To this end, the implementation and
experiences of a wireless-enabled monitoring system for back-pain patients will be
presented in this work that will improve the relative paucity of the existing tools and
techniques in ways that the total quality of treatment will be considered more effec-
tive than the to date practices.
3 Prototype Design and Implementation
In this chapter, the work will be focused on the design aspects of the application,
which will be presented by proposing and demonstrating a system structure and archi-
tecture. This proposed model will then be the fundamental basis for the applications'
implementation. Thus, this work will be now taken a step further by initially identify-
ing the users and their requirements that will help us complement the knowledge
acquired during the thorough review of the various tools and methods available in the
back pain field performed in the previous section. Our work will continue then by
coming up with the proposed system structure and architecture, and a high level de-
scription of its functionality.
3.1 User Requirements
The design of the prototype was conducted in collaboration with a team of clinicians
from the Rheumatology Department of the Northwick Park Hospital, London, who
would potentially use the system, and the purpose was twofold: first interviews with
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