Applicability of the Reliable Evaluation Infrastructure Toolkit for Facilitating Self-care Research

State of the art healthcare devices currently used in the unsupervised setting holds several challenges with regard to the reliability of selfmeasured data. This affects the validity of the data and may lead to ineffective or unnecessary treatments. Pervasive healthcare concepts and context-aware technology appears promising as a way of mitigating these challenges and delivering a higher data quality. Carrying out relevant feasibility studies for addressing these challenges implies overcoming considerable technical barriers. System developers often have to rely on overly complex, error-prone, and time consuming platforms and technologies. Therefore, tools and technologies for facilitating rapid prototyping of self-care solutions are needed. The Reliable Evaluation Infrastructure (RELEI) is a toolkit for facilitating research into patient self-care activities in the unsupervised setting. It is based on rapid prototyping systems engineering methods and technologies. It supplies a range of relevant pervasive enabling hardware and software components for this purpose. The aim of this study was to evaluate the applicability of RELEI for facilitating self-care research projects. First, we present the RELEI toolkit and illustrate typical usage in two self-care case studies. Following this, RELEI is evaluated through 11 case studies. In conclusion, the RELEI toolkit was shown to be applicable for facilitating self-care related research projects in a wide spectrum of self-care projects.