Nekane Larburu Rubio successfully defended her PhD at Univeristy of Twente (The Netherlands), titled Quality of Clinical Data Aware Telemedicine Systems

Modern day telemedicine systems make use of clinical data to provide clinical services to patients and medical professionals.  Though technology has advanced over the years, the quality of the measured clinical data may not always fulfill the medical quality requirements, particularly due to technological context variations (i.e. technical disruptions). Such clinical data quality degradation may lead to undesirable outcomes which can put a patient’s safety at risk.

This research provides insights into a generic quality of clinical data (QoD) aware telemedicine system. We propose a Context-Layering Technique that bridges the gap between the technological context and the clinical context. This way, the clinical context can adapt when the clinical data degrades due to technological context variations.

We propose an architecture which comprises a QoD Broker component, which is in charge of computing clinical data quality, and a guideline-based clinical decision support system, which has the ability to adapt treatment decisions when clinical data quality varies. The QoD-aware telemedicine system prototype has been evaluated in the context of MobiGuide FP7 European project with successful results. 

This research done during Nekane Larburu's PhD explores the impact of technological context on QoD and the effect of degraded QoD on the treatment. It provides insights into the development process of integrating QoD-awareness in telemedicine systems which will help to preserve treatment quality and patient safety even during QoD degradation.

She holds a Master of Telecommunication Engineering from the Public University of Navarre, Spain. She completed one year of her engineering studies at Central Michigan University (USA) and completed her graduation project at IMEC (The Netherlands) in 2011. Soon after that, she joined the University of Twente as a full time researcher. From 2012 to 2016, she completed her PhD research and participated in the European project MobiGuide, where she contributed in the development of a clinical data quality aware clinical decision support system. She has authored several international publications including journal, conference and book chapter contributions.