A META-SYNTHESIS APPROACH TO PROVISION ROLES WITH TRUST IN TELECARE

摘要

Telecare is referred to as a highly portable ICT system for monitoring health status of people. Role provisioning is an essential, yet very complex process in design of telecare services. Even though role provisioning is widely undertaken for modelling human access-controls in administration of computer based systems, networks or databases, roles such as administrator, manager, employer, and employee are often pre-defined and organised in hierarchies. We call the hierarchies "static role settings". In this paper we synthesis why static role settings are not scalable to telecare services. We show that once telecare roles such as doctors and nurses are working online, their functions may be impossible to adequately pre-define. Their professional expertise and skills in participating telecare services are highly variable; they must be resourceful, so must be able to cross multiple levels of service operations. Moreover, while online, not only patients must trust the services, but also health professionals must trust all the service sessions. To understand these complex issues holistically, meta-synthesis is used as an improved methodology to synthesise roles within their own online environments. We call the relevant online environments "dynamic role-settings". Then role provisioning is treated as important of human centred healthcare protocols that establish a dynamic channel of interactions between a care provider (e.g. doctor) and a care-receiver (e.g. patient); that control the care receiver' s problems and care provider' s responsibilities; that centrally control factors which might otherwise confound the causal effect of communication on the endpoints of interests.