Development of a Formal Framework for Usable Operations Support

E-Health entails the use of advanced communications and computing technologies to support health care delivery and education. Unfortunately, most applications designed for health care are still facedwith obstacles, such as confidentiality, privacy of medical data, interoperability, dependability, and usability, to their wide acceptance. Operations Support in e-Health based systems can only be provided within a formal framework to eliminate system errors, improve dependability and enhance usability. The formal framework presented in this thesis uses algebraic specifications in object constraint language (OCL) and Unified Modelling Language (UML) in the analysis and design of some subsystems in an e-Health based system. Wireless Markup Language (WML) and Java programming language were used to develop the operations support functionality with real-time access to medical information via hand-held devices demonstrated in this thesis. The application was deployed on a 3-tiered client/server architecture with hand-held devices as clients, providing mobile access to real-time information from server-based systems within a care centre. The system was evaluated empirically and analytically.