## 7 Conclusions  
Telemedicine plays a pivotal role in improving healthcare accessibility by enabling remote consultations, ensuring that individuals, regardless of their geographical location, can receive timely medical advice and treatment. It also increases patient convenience by reducing the need for physical visits to healthcare facilities, therefore saving time and minimizing the risk of exposure to contagious diseases. As a matter of fact, telemedicine has proven crucial during public health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, by facilitating safe and efficient healthcare delivery while reducing the burden on overstretched healthcare systems. In this paper, we presented a system called HealthTracker which has been specifically designed and implemented to support telemedicine by enabling facilities to collect data generated by health-monitoring devices, store them securely in the cloud, and analyze them with advanced algorithms for both statistical analysis and future trend predictions. HealthTracker is composed of both software and hardware components that seamlessly interact to provide the above functionalities. A significant part of our research effort has focused on designing and constructing a new health-monitoring wearable device equipped with a set of innovative sensors that have never been implemented together in a single device before. Preliminary tests have shown that the system works well and that it is ready for real experimentation that will start soon. This experimentation is already planned as part of a joint project that will involve the Department of Translational Medicine of the University of Eastern Piedmont (DIMET-UPO) and the Hospital of Alessandria--Respiratory Diseases ward. In this real experimentation, we will also be able to explore the potential limitations of our study. In particular, some issues related to technical problems or human behavior can occur, as discussed below. Concerning the technical issue, the devices need a smartphone with a working Internet connection: if an Internet connection is not available, both devices have an internal memory able to store data for no more than about 2.5 h for the HDC device and about 40 h for the Viatom Checkme O2 device. If an Internet connection is not recovered within these limits, then data will be lost after this period. Concerning human behavior issues, devices work if the patients wear them correctly and as long as possible. This means that the experimentation needs an active collaboration of the patients during the study. Moreover, devices need to be charged when the residual batter capacity is lower than 15%. This means that nurses must take care of the devices by checking both that they are worn correctly by the patients and that they always have a residual battery level above 15%. This study will pursue several goals, namely:  
1. it will perform safety and functionality validation tests in accordance with IEC 62304 (that is, a functional safety standard that covers safe design and maintenance of software specific for medical devices [37]) and IEC 60601-2-49 standard (which applies to the basic safety and essential performance requirements of multifunction patient monitoring equipment [38]);
2. it will evaluate the calibration of the response and cross-check the validity of the data on patients at Alessandria's hospital;
3. it will assess the ease of use of the wearable device and the software interfaces according to the IEC 62304 standard;
4. it will assess the safety of the user interface according to the IEC 62366 standard (specifies a process for a manufacturer to analyze, specify, develop, and evaluate the usability of a medical device as it relates to safety [39]);
5. it will consider further application aspects for the National Health Service, such as the reimbursement of the device. In future work, we plan to perform a quantitative comparison analysis of the HDC device with other potentially similar devices.