Clinicians' Knowledge and Perception of Telemedicine Technology

INTRODUCTION: Telemedicine is an application of information and communication technology in the healthcare environment. This study aimed to compare knowledge and perceptions of telemedicine technology among different groups of clinicians. METHODS: This survey study was conducted in 2013. The potential participants included 532 clinicians who worked in two hospitals and three clinics in a northern province of Iran. Data were collected using a five-point Likert-scale questionnaire. The content validity of the questionnaire was checked, and the reliability was calculated using Cronbach's alpha coefficient (α = 0.73). RESULTS: The results showed that most of the clinicians (96.1 percent) had little knowledge about telemedicine. They perceived the advantages of telemedicine at a moderate level and its disadvantages at a low level. The knowledge of dentists about this technology was less than that of other groups, and as a result they were less positive about the advantages of telemedicine compared to nurses, general physicians, and specialists. CONCLUSION: The limited knowledge of clinicians about telemedicine seems to have influenced their perceptions of the technology. Therefore, providing healthcare professionals with more information about new technologies in healthcare, such as telemedicine, can help to gain a more realistic picture of their perceptions

FREE INTERACTOR MATRIX METHOD FOR CONTROL PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF MULTI-VARIATE SYSTEMS

In this paper, an alternative method for the assessment of multi-vitiate control loop performance with consider twocircumstances. First, known time delays between each pair of inputs and outputs, and second, without relying on any a priori knowledge about the process model or timedelays. The performance of the control loop is calculated from data driven autoregressive moving average (ARMA) and prediction error model. It is clear that the limited data in scalar measure used for performance assessment results tends to steady-state as time tends to infinity, but large number of samples gives risen in scalar measures and tends to infinity as time samples tends to infinity and therefore it becomes difficult to calculate the performance index. In this paper, the later problem is solved by considering initial part of scalar measures with steady value for next-to-next time samples to calculate the control-loop performance index which would be utilized to decide healthy working of the control loop. Simulation example is included to show the performance index of multi-variate control loop