A methodology for developing quality of information metrics for body sensor design

Abstract

Body sensors networks (BSNs) are emerging technologies that are enabling long-term, continuous, remote monitoring of physiologic and biokinematic information for various medical applications. Because of the varying computational, storage, and communication capabilities of di↵erent components in the BSN, system designers must make design choices that trade o↵ information quality with resource consumption and system battery lifetime. Given these trade-o↵s, there is the possibility that the information presented to the health practitioner at the end point may deviate from what was originally sensed. In some cases, these deviations may cause a practitioner to make a di↵erent decision from what would have been made given the original data. Engineers working on such systems typically resort to traditional measures of data quality like RMSE; however, these metrics have been shown in many cases to not correlate well with the notions of information quality for the particular application. Objective metrics of information distortion and its e↵ects on decision making are therefore necessary to help BSN designers make more informed trade-o↵s between design constraints and information quality and to help practitioners understand the kind of information being produced by BSNs, on which they have to base decisions. In this paper, we present a general methodology for developing such metrics for various BSN applications, illustrate how this methodology can be applied to a real application through a case study, and discuss issues with developing such metrics.

Towards a Framework for Safety Analysis of Body Sensor Networks

“…Moreover, recent work [1,11] shows that safety bounds can be determined on the values of outputs of a medical instrument and used to inform system design. Though the results are preliminary, it is reasonable for our purposes to assume that such bounds exist and can be determined.…”

“…Also, the deviation could refer to complex semantic features of the reported information like those explored in [1,11].…”

“…De Santis et al used modeling techniques to study the potential risks of ultra-wide band (UWB) radios for the patients [4]. Armenti et al explored issues in BSNs that can potentially mislead clinicians to make wrong medical decisions [1], but considered such issues more from the data quality perspective. The comparison-based approach in [1] inspired the definition of BSN safety in this paper, and its results provide us the basis for exploring safety issues associated with the interface between the BSN and the clinician.…”

“…Armenti et al explored issues in BSNs that can potentially mislead clinicians to make wrong medical decisions [1], but considered such issues more from the data quality perspective. The comparison-based approach in [1] inspired the definition of BSN safety in this paper, and its results provide us the basis for exploring safety issues associated with the interface between the BSN and the clinician. This paper, on the other hand, generalizes previous research, in the sense that it considers safety of BSNs by understanding the general dynamics of non-therapeutic BSNs and their interaction with other related parties.…”

“…The ultimate challenge is to assure the safety of patients who use BSNs 1 . In this paper, we focus on BSNs that are sense-only systems.…”