Proceedings Article | 26 September 2013
KEYWORDS: Telemedicine, Video, Surgery, Medicine, Medical imaging, Magnetic resonance imaging, Diagnostics, Telecommunications, Computed tomography, Data acquisition
Telemedicine that involves sharing of digital data (i.e. physiological signals, 2D/3D images and videos) should meet the
same standards of traditional healthcare in terms of usability, accessibility, efficiency, effectiveness and quality of
clinical processes. All these requirements can be seen as elementary components that participate to the quality of
experience (QoE) in an ad hoc medical application scenario. Although, the quality of service (QoS) in telemedicine has
been quite investigated, QoE is still lacking clear definition in this context. This later should not be assimilated to QoS as
it refers clearly to the experience by the user while QoS focuses mostly on the system. QoE has a potential relevancy to
optimize and understand the technical transmission chain from the final task point viewpoint which one of the most
important factor for adoption of telemedicine. Towards this goal, QoE studies should be conducted with an appropriate
methodology incorporating user involvement and digital data and their relation with QoS. As one of the first effort in this
field, this paper proposes a survey of some key issues and solutions associated to QoE in telemedicine. We first present
the services offered by telemedicine and underline the significance of QoE for tele-diagnosis and tele-surgery. Next, we
identify and analyze the influencing factors such as application area, application purpose (emergency care, acquisition
assistance, second opinion, education...), content type (data specificities depending on acquisition modality), context of
use (offline/real time, interactivity...), and user's state (stress, expertise...), that have to be considered for a relevant QoE
assessment in telemedicine.
