Essay On Telehealth Computing Bandwidth: Non-Functional And Functional Requirements.

Question:

Discuss About The Telehealth Ubiquitous Computing Bandwidth?

Telehealth is a project that is introduced for improving the process of providing healthcare services in rural public hospitals. This project is to deliver a high quality heath service irrespective of the geographical barrier. Telehealth is software that operates in a real time basis, and is a cost effective solution. It is an alternative to the traditional way of offering the healthcare services (Steele & Lo, 2013). The use of this Telehealth software is expected to improve the patient’s outcome and driving greater efficiency in terms of the ways in which the healthcare services are delivered. This software will link all the emergency department of the nearest hospitals with the help of videoconferencing with an aim of delivering 24*7 emergency services in the rural areas as well. Use of a cloud-based solution in the software is an effective way of accessing and storing all the records of the hospitals and the patients (AlZain, et al., 2012). The report discusses various aspects of the using a cloud based solution in the project.

A system’s non-functional requirements help in identifying the requirements that judge the vital operation of a system. This includes the system requirements, hardware or software requirements, and constraints.

Functionality is an important aspect in identifying the non-functional requirements of Telehealth project as it analyzes the needs of the customers (Jain & Nandakumar, 2012). The major non-functional requirement is ensuring the proper security of the Telehealth system. This is essential to improve the security of the customers’ data stored in the system. Furthermore, since the system is to be generated for linking all the management departments of the hospitals, it is essential to consider the throughput of the system. A system development with high throughput is therefore, another non-functional requirement.

The non-functional requirement associated with the usability of the system determines how effective the product is from a user’s point of view. Since the project is to be developed for providing emergency healthcare services to the people of rural areas, the user interface should be simple and easy to use. Furthermore, the users of the system should be able to access and use the emergency services without any hazards and therefore, it is essential to implement a system that comes with proper step-by-step guidance about its operation.

The system to be implemented should be reliable enough so as to provide and uninterrupted emergency services to the people in rural areas. Therefore, having an option of data backup and recovery is an essential non-functional requirement. Since the system is to be implemented on cloud, it will not be an issue to enforce a proper disaster recovery option for implementation of a reliable Telehealth system.

Functional Requirements

The project is very important and crucial as it aims at delivering a system that will link all the emergency healthcare centers across the rural region and provide emergency services to the patients via video conferencing. The After-Hours Urgent Care Telehealth project should therefore provide uninterrupted services to its clients. Ensuring a minimum response time of the system to be developed is therefore and important non-functional requirement. Another advantage of implementing the system in a cloud platform is an increased memory space of the system, which is another major non-functional requirement.

The proposed system is a completely new venture. Therefore, important non-functional requirements of the project include testability, extensibility, serviceability and configurability of the system. The After-Hours Urgent Care Telehealth system should support all these non-functional requirements of the system (Krupinski & Bernard, 2014).

Apart from these main non-functional requirements, the project should further consider the design constraints, implementation requirements and physical requirements of the system.

A system cannot be implemented without considering the functional requirements of the system unlike the non functional requirements. Ensuring proper security needs is another major function requirements. The Telehealth should be secure for storing a sensitive data of the patients. In order to ensure implementation of a secure system, proper authentication and authorization levels are to be enforced in the system for eliminating the risk of unauthorized data access. Therefore, authentication is one of the major functional requirements of the project. Non-Functional requirements of the system on the other hand ensure smooth operations of the system (Chung et al., 2012). Both functional and non functional requirements are needed to be considered for proper system implementation.  

The project aims at providing emergency healthcare services to the customers and therefore, ensuring proper security and confidential of the patients’ data is a major functional requirement of the system. The cloud environment chosen for implementation of the After-Hours Urgent Care Telehealth is hybrid cloud environment. This is because the hybrid cloud environment provides certain additional benefits over the private and public cloud environment.

The use of public cloud environment would not be suitable for this project. This is because the project links all the emergency departments of the nearest hospitals via video conferencing. Therefore, this will include storage of confidential data of the patients and the hospital. Since the pubic cloud is accessible by all, it is very vulnerable to attacks (Chen & Zhao, 2012). Therefore, implementation of Telehealth project in public cloud environment is not an effective idea. Implementation of the system in a public cloud environment however could have been a cost effective solution.

Choosing the Right Cloud Environment

The private cloud environment on the other hand provides a distinct and a secure cloud solution (Galibus & Vissia, 2015). However, there are certain constraints associated with the implementation of this project in a private cloud environment. The major drawback of using private cloud is that for increasing the security essentials of a system, private clouds allows only a specified client in accessing the information stored in the system or operating the system. If the After-Hours Urgent Care Telehealth project is implemented in a private cloud environment, it will constrict the accessibility of the system. Furthermore, the cost of implementing a system in a private cloud is higher in comparison to the public cloud as it requires an installation of a dedicated network for a particular system for enhanced security (Li et al., 2013). Therefore, it is not recommended to implement the project After-Hours Urgent Care Telehealth in a private cloud environment.   

Hybrid cloud consists of the features of both public and private cloud environment. Hybrid cloud ensures proper data security and therefore patients as well as hospital data can be securely stored in the system. Since hybrid-cloud consists features of both public and private cloud, the private network of hybrid cloud ensures data security while the public network increases the accessibility of the system (Li et al., 2015). Therefore, it is recommended to implement the project in a hybrid cloud environment.

The strengths of hybrid cloud are as follows-

The hybrid cloud environment ensures proper security and confidentiality of the data. Therefore, use of hybrid cloud in system implementaion would be beneficial for protecting the privacy and confidentiality of the data stored in the system (Kulkarni et al., 2012).

Use of hybrid cloud in implementation of the system will be a cost effective solution for the organization. The public network of the hybrid cloud can be leveraged from a service provider that will in turn reduce the total IT equipment cost of the project.

The hybrid cloud environment provides easier and secure access to the stored datain the system. Therefore, it is safe to implement the Telehealth project in the hybrid cloud environment.

1. The data movement to and fro of the public and private cloud is vulnerable to outside attacks. Attackers can target this data movement in order to steal the confidential information stored in the system.
2. The implementation cost is grreater than that of implementing the system in a public cloud environment.

The sensitive and confidential nature of the patients data can be therefore be kept secured by using proper authorization and encryption for managing

The SDLC or software development life cycle approach is an important consideration in implementation of a software. SDLC approach defines the stages involved in development or implementation of a software. The details about predictive and adaptive SDLC are as follows (Balaji & Murugaiyan, 2012)-

SDLC Approach

Predictive SLDC approach provides a detailed overview of the stages involved in implementation of a project. Therefore, in this approach the all the stages of project development are pre planned before the project reaches its execution phase. Predictive SDLC model can therefore be used in project implementation that has a predetermined and clear scope and requirements. The scope of the project implemented using predictive SDLC approach however, cannot be modified once the project reaches its execution phase (Mahalakshmi & Sundararajan, 2013).

The pros of using a predictive SDLC in implementation of this project are as follows (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016)-

1. Predictive SDLC approach ensures completion of the project within the scheduled time.
2. Since the phases of the project are pre determined, it becomes easier to track the project progress.
3. The budget estimation of the project becomes easier and accurate as the project requirements remains clear since the project initiation phase.
4. It becomes very difficult to make modifications in the project while its implementation
5. The feedback path is generally absent in predictive SDLC.

Adaptive SDLC unlike predictive SDLC does not define the entire project in the initiation phase. The schedule of the project can be modified while the project execution. The pros and cons of adaptive SDLC are as follows (Tuteja & Dubey, 2012)-

1. The project does not follow a fixed schedule or plan and therefore project improvement becomes easier.
2. Presence of feedback path helps in big fixing prior to the deployment of the system
3. There remains a risk of project not being implemented within the set schedule
4. Budget of the project remains inconsistent.

Therefore, it is recommended for this project to use a predictive SDLC approach as the requirements and scope of the project is clear.

Conclusion

Therefore, it can be deduced that the Telehealth project should implement the system in a hybrid cloud, as it will provide proper data security. Furthermore, the project needs to be implemented using predictive SDLC approach for ensuring the project completion within scheduled time. Since the scope and requirements of the project is clear, predictive approach will be best for implementing the project.

References

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Balaji, S., & Murugaiyan, M. S. (2012). Waterfall vs. V-Model vs. Agile: A comparative study on SDLC. International Journal of Information Technology and Business Management, 2(1), 26-30.

Chen, D., & Zhao, H. (2012, March). Data security and privacy protection issues in cloud computing. In Computer Science and Electronics Engineering (ICCSEE), 2012 International Conference on (Vol. 1, pp. 647-651). IEEE.

Chung, L., Nixon, B. A., Yu, E., & Mylopoulos, J. (2012). Non-functional requirements in software engineering (Vol. 5). Springer Science & Business Media.

Galibus, T., & Vissia, H. E. R. M. (2015). Cloud storage security. Proc NSCE, 2014, 123-127.

Jain, A. K., & Nandakumar, K. (2012). Biometric Authentication: System Security and User Privacy. IEEE Computer, 45(11), 87-92.

Krupinski, E. A., & Bernard, J. (2014, February). Standards and guidelines in telemedicine and Healthcare. In Healthcare(Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 74-93). Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.

Kulkarni, G., Gambhir, J., Patil, T., & Dongare, A. (2012, June). A security aspects in cloud computing. In Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS), 2012 IEEE 3rd International Conference on (pp. 547-550). IEEE.

Li, J., Li, Y. K., Chen, X., Lee, P. P., & Lou, W. (2015). A hybrid cloud approach for secure authorized deduplication. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 26(5), 1206-1216.

Li, Q., Wang, Z. Y., Li, W. H., Li, J., Wang, C., & Du, R. Y. (2013). Applications integration in a hybrid cloud computing environment: Modelling and platform. Enterprise Information Systems, 7(3), 237-271.

Mahalakshmi, M., & Sundararajan, M. (2013). Traditional SDLC Vs Scrum Methodology–A Comparative Study. International Journal of Emerging psychology and Advanced Engineering, 3(6), 192-196.

Rittinghouse, J. W., & Ransome, J. F. (2016). Cloud computing: implementation, management, and security. CRC press.

Steele, R., & Lo, A. (2013). Telehealth and ubiquitous computing for bandwidth-constrained rural and remote areas. Personal and ubiquitous computing, 17(3), 533-543.

Tuteja, M., & Dubey, G. (2012). A research study on importance of testing and quality assurance in software development life cycle (SDLC) models. International Journal of Soft Computing and Engineering (IJSCE), 2(3), 251-257