Cloud-Based Medical Solutions For Rural Areas

Non-Functional Requirements of FURPS+

Identify and analyse the uses of cloud-based services and their application in the context of Telehealth to provide medical care to the people of the rural areas.

Rural areas have been deprived of medical care for a very long time. The doctors and the health care professionals avert from visiting the rural areas to provide the essential medical care due to time, monetary or equipment constraints. Cloud based medical solutions is the solution to this problem. The doctors would be able to save commute time and provide faster health care to the people residing in the rural areas. This report consists of elaborations on the non-functional requirements of FURPS+, the advantages and disadvantages for using cloud-based solutions and the comprehensive approach towards using the Predictive and Adaptive Software Development Life Cycle. The purpose of this report is to identify and analyze the benefits of using cloud-based solutions for providing medical care to the people of the rural areas.

Non-Functional Requirements

• Critical System Requirements: The critical system requirements entails that the system would be able to sufficiently meet the requirements of the customer with its specifications and services. Mathematical methods of software development can be applied to cloud-based services as it minimizes the amount of testing required before launching the project online.
• System Interfaces: System Interfacing means that any number systems on a given network can effortlessly interact with one another. System interfacing is thus essential among systems using cloud-based technologies. Universal interfaces are required to maintain standardisation as the users can then use any system to access the services.
• User Interface Requirements: The users need a common and easy to use user interface. Visual and audio aids add to the usability of the interface (Balatsoukas et al., 2015). The interface must be easy to use with a help tips sections to support the users if they face any issues.
• System Constraints: Every system has its own set of constraints that can limit the utilization of the system. Cloud based system can be have different constraints like security issues, set-up cost, possible downtime and cost of data transfer. All these limitations are to be addressed and the effects minimized before implementing such technology in important sectors such as medical care.
• Usability: The user interface requirements and issues are identified that includes accessibility issues, aesthetics of the interface and stability of the user interface. The cloud-based solutions can be effectively used by the users only if they understand the process of using the technology (Kabir, Rehman & Majumdar, 2016). New technology can be difficult to use by people who do not technical understanding. To make the process easier it is highly recommended that the user interface is smooth and easy to use. This means that the users are exposed to the least amount of the technical aspect of the system. This increases the usability and the users can use the system with little knowledge of its internal working.
• Reliability: The reliability of a system includes the accuracy and the recovering mechanisms of the system. High reliability would mean that the system has high computational power and effortless recovery after a major shut-down failure. The cloud system can face downtime due to various technical issues. However, high reliability would denote that investment in such technology is productive.
• Performance: The performance of the system comprises of the system start-up time, recovering time, response time and information exchange capability of the system. A cloud system must have high performance capabilities otherwise there would be very low return on investment for the users.
• Security: Patient records are confidential and the system must include high security measures that would prevent any data theft from hacking (Almorsy, Grundy & Müller, 2016). Cyber security is an important aspect of cloud-based technologies as it will be attacked by hackers for stealing data.

Advantages

• Flexibility: Users can be added or removed from cloud services corresponding to the requirement. Thus, cloud-based services are optimum for inconstant bandwidth demands. This flexibility is essential especially in a growing medical industry.
• Disaster-Recovery: Large organizations have the necessary capital and IT experts to recover from disasters at a fast rate (Phillips, 2015). However, the small and medium enterprises cannot quickly recover from a disaster as they lack the required IT expertise and funds. Thus, cloud computing can be used to get fast disaster-recovery solutions.
• Automatic Updates to Software: Updated software is necessary for receiving the necessary security updates. Cloud vendors regularly update their systems and software. Hence, the consumers do not have to expend any resources to update their IT services.
• Reduced Cost: The consumers incur reduced cost of hardware by applying cloud computing. A subscription-based cloud services is thus advantageous for businesses and projects as initial investment required is low.
• Increased Collaboration: The employees of an organization can share and edit documents over the cloud platform. Real time operations are required for fast information sharing among a large group of people.
• Access from anywhere: Cloud services can be accessed from any place in the world and from any device like a personal computer or a smartphone. The only requirement is a stable internet connection. Such flexibility is beneficial in medical sector as the doctors and the medical care professionals will have more versatility while working in the rural areas where mobility is a prerequisite.
• Document Control: The files and document transfers can be very conflicting when conducted over large user base through email attachments (Younis, Kifayat & Merabti, 2014). Cloud services eliminate such problems as they merge all formatting into a universal format that can be accessed by everyone.
• Security: Data theft has been a serious issue since the advent of the Internet. Databanks of various companies have been attacked by hackers at different points of time with the intent to steal data (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). Security in the cloud-based applications is very high. The security protocols applied by companies like Google are very tough to penetrate. Using cloud services from these companies thus automatically upgrades the data security of the consumers.

Disadvantages

• Possible downtime: All internet-based services can face downtime during their operation tenure. All the operations of a business or services using cloud will be halted during the downtime. Vendors can reduce the duration of server downtime by arranging for back-ups and automatic router restarts.
• Security Issues: Security updates are sometimes still not enough to block every attack. Some attacks can penetrate through (Inukollu, Arsi & Ravuri, 2014). Organizations storing all their data on the cloud servers are most vulnerable to such attacks. They will lose most or all their data depending on the magnitude of the attack.
• Cost: The software used by an organization may not be entirely supported by the cloud services. Moving the custom-made application to the cloud will add on to the expenditure of the organization.
• Data Transfer Cost: Fast data transfer requires fast internet access with high bandwidth capabilities. Real-time connectivity also requires a stable internet connection. Such a connection is very costly and adds up to the expenditure suffered by the companies.
• System Update: The huge leap in software updates might require new and improved hardware to work effectively. Fresh investment is thus needed by the companies to be productive.
• Inflexibility: The vendors use proprietary technology to prevent consumers from migrating to another vendor. Migrating from one cloud service vendor to another is very expensive. It is thus impossible for small and medium enterprises to shift vendors.

Predictive SDLC

Pros:

• The steps of planning and execution are structured. Such projects have definite requirement gathering process, documentation, system design process, implementation of the plans, testing the created project, delivery and maintenance (Sakul-Ung & Chutimaskul, 2017). This type of life cycle can thus be used for projects where the steps are fixed and no changes are required.
• The outcome is fixed and controllable. The outcome is well determined even before the completion of the execution phase. The model follows one execution step after another that has been pre-determined during the planning process.
• In this methodology, there is innate documentation of every step. This provides a smooth flow of information from one step to the next and no amount of information is lost in the process (el Ata & Perks, 2014).

Cons:

• No changes can be made after finalizing the planning process. The execution phase is thus very inflexible. Applying spontaneous risk management is impossible in the execution phase.
• Any changes requested by the client end can never be applied to the project. This type of life cycle can be used only if the outcome of the project is fixed otherwise the final product received by the client will not meet all its requirements.
• The stages of project development are fixed. Thus, testing can be conducted only after the entire execution phase. This means any modification to the project will produce substantial delay in the project.

Adaptive SDLC

Pros:

• Any changes requested by the client can be applied to the project.
• All sorts of uncertainties can be easily handled using this approach. Risk management is thus effortless and practicable due to this process.
• The review cycles are less as most of the review are conducted during the iterative planning process. Thus, modifications and the final testing procedure does not consume an absurd amount of time.      

Cons:

• There can be many absurd assumptions during the planning phase due to lack of understanding of the actual agile process. Such processes can be hard to implement if the entire team is unaware of the methodologies (Öztürk, 2016).
• The outcome can never be predicted in an agile process scenario. The plans are changed and modified at each step to meet the current scenario. This creates an anomaly in the outcome of the project.
• Every team employing this life cycle methodology must be cross-functional. This means that the teams consist of people from various backgrounds and services. These people might not be cooperative due to having difference of opinion while working together.

The adaptive Software Development Life Cycle approach can be used in this project as risk management and meeting the varying user requirement will be the top priority in this project. During the implementation phase, the users might request to add some additional services or request to remove some unused services to reduce the incurred the cost. A separate training module can also be implemented during the project implementation phase if required. Such addition or removal of services can only be executed in an adaptive SDLC approach.

Conclusion

Thus, it can be concluded that cloud-based technologies can be used to implement services for Telehealth that would facilitate and improve the medical care capabilities. The doctors would be able to connect to any remote device and provide the essential medical care. The rural areas have been neglected of proper medical care to unreachability. Hence, with the use of this technology they would be able receive medical care at cheap prices

Reference List

Almorsy, M., Grundy, J., & Müller, I. (2016). An analysis of the cloud computing security problem. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.01107.

Balatsoukas, P., Williams, R., Davies, C., Ainsworth, J., & Buchan, I. (2015). User interface requirements for web-based integrated care pathways: Evidence from the evaluation of an online care pathway investigation tool. Journal of medical systems, 39(11), 183.

el Ata, N. A., & Perks, M. J. (2014). Using Predictive Analytics to Mature IT Production. In Solving the Dynamic Complexity Dilemma (pp. 221-235). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Inukollu, V. N., Arsi, S., & Ravuri, S. R. (2014). Security issues associated with big data in cloud computing. International Journal of Network Security & Its Applications, 6(3), 45.

Kabir, M. A., Rehman, M. U., & Majumdar, S. I. (2016, August). An analytical and comparative study of software usability quality factors. In Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS), 2016 7th IEEE International Conference on (pp. 800-803). IEEE.

Öztürk, V. (2016). Flexible and Adaptive Life Cycle Framework for Software Development. JSW, 11(9), 943-951.

Phillips, B. D. (2015). Disaster recovery. CRC press.

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

Sakul-Ung, P., & Chutimaskul, W. (2017, February). A predictive model for successful software development projects with information technology strategic alignment. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Software and Computer Applications (pp. 39-45). ACM.

Younis, Y. A., Kifayat, K., & Merabti, M. (2014). An access control model for cloud computing. Journal of Information Security and Applications, 19(1), 45-60