An Element Management System for a Telehealth Remote Patient Monitoring Environment

One of the major service areas of telemedicine, also referred to as telehealth, is remote patient monitoring. Some of the concerns that arise when considering the remotely located medical equipment used by remote patients are the management of initialization, usage, safety, security, calibration and reliability. It is well documented that due to the unique usage patterns and data sensitivity of the remote telehealth devices, the use of traditional network management protocols may not be the most efficient for use throughout the entire management plane of the telemedicine environment. Many examples of remote management are not customized to the unique challenges imposed by medical data and networked medical equipment. The majority of solutions available today are proprietary and lack open standardization. In this dissertation, is a proposal of a structured element management system for remote telemedicine devices, named the Telehealth Element Management System (TEMS), which will alleviate many of the above-mentioned concerns, while also fully leveraging open standards of network management and making an impact on the overall growth of the telemedicine market. The dissertation is organized as follows: Introduction and Literature Review, followed by defining the TEMS Architecture, Functionality, and Implementation. The summation of the the dissertation will be provided in the Conclusion.