6 Scenario Home care Rural health center International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications Table 3: Perceived beneﬁts of Tile-Ippokratis services. Type of users Physicians Good alternative for avoiding frequent visits to the hospital Long term-appreciation of patient’s situation—useful in cases of emergency Shifting of the location of care, out of hospitals Sense of “team” work between remote located medical personnel Time savings from patients’ transportation to Skylitsio General Hospital and other large hospitals Increased sense of safety because of the second opinion choice Low-cost ehealth services. One ehealth system for many patients Ensuring continuity of healthcare and patient followups Patients Increased sense of safety Avoidance of unnecessary visits to the hospital Increased sense of “always connected” with their doctors Larger number of patients own their electronic personal record Increased positive attitude against ICT technologies Promotion of behavioural modiﬁcation, goal setting, prevention rather than treatment and adjusting to living with a chronic disease improving patients’ feeling of safety Assist patients to self-manage their chronic condition and enhance supportive measures to promote self-management in the long term through ehealth equipment must maintain its integrity during transmission for the receiver (usually a doctor or medical personnel) to be able to produce an informed and valid opinion on the patient’s condition. In both “home care” and “rural health center” scenarios, which were examined during the same trial, there were two major types of medical data transmitted through the applied network. (i) Numerical data which are essentially the biosignals recorded by the system (weight, 1 lead ECG, BP, HR, SpO2, and temperature). (ii) Video-conferencing ﬁles. These were recordings au- tomatically captured by the video-conferencing soft- ware which could be stored for subsequent review. According to the data recorded by the project servers, in both these cases there has been no problem with the quality of data transmitted. Data was of excellent quality, and there were no complaints from both client and server units. Given the stable connectivity among the client and server sites there were no failures in the transmission of data. The fourth factor was interference to other medical equipments. There were no recorded problems regarding the interference of the equipment with other medical devices mainly in the rural health centers scenario. Users from both server and client units expressed a positive opinion on the interface and data entering procedures of the devices used by Tile-Ippokratis. 4.2. Evaluation of User Acceptance of the Ehealth Platform. Following the technical evaluation, a small-scale evaluation of the users’ acceptance of the systems was performed. Whitten et al. [16] point out that users see the ehealth systems primarily as services provided to them and not as new technologies. Having this in mind and the fact that the success of every system relies on the user acceptance and user opinion must be taken into serious account as well. The evaluation of the users’ acceptance of the systems included collection of data on perceived beneﬁts for the services provided. Users were asked to ﬁll in questionnaires regarding their experience with the interaction with the system. Interviewing them allowed us to clarify hidden attitudes and beliefs. Their views, from both server and client perspective, are summarised in Table 3. The proposed platform was surprisingly welcomed by patients and carers because of its simplicity and functionality although most of the patients were not comfortable with using video communication and pc technology (especially the elderly one). The whole service has been viewed as an early warning mechanism which helps prevent frequent hospital visits. But although the regular user’s followup and the scheduled reassessment and reinforcement of the pilot patients and medical personnel were taking place and the service was free of use for the duration of the validation phase (the project covered the communication cost together with the cost of the devices), it was observed a drop in usage rates although this was not the case according to the speciﬁed protocol. More speciﬁcally the usage rates as registered in the data base revealed that almost for the ﬁrst month the users conformed to the speciﬁed medical protocol and their measurements were taken frequently as asked. But after that period the number of measurements started to gradually reduce. This behavior, mainly coming from the postsurgery patients, makes us conclude that the users are not willing to use frequently/daily and for long time periods ehealth monitoring devices even if they are asked to do it. According to Papadopoulos [17] this attitude can be explained by the fact that the patients do not perceive immediately the beneﬁts of the mobile health applications since these services provide preventive medicine rather than cure.