Towards collaborative work among speech therapists, phoniatricians, and ENT professionals: Analysis of the impact of ciphering techniques in the performance of an integrated tool for the diagnosis of voice disorders
This paper describes new improvements carried out in an integrated tool that was previously developed for the diagnosis of voice disorders. Such tool was developed for the analysis and screening of pathological voices, so the experts can store a complete history and anamnesis of the patient to track his/her evolution by simultaneous recording of speech, electroglottographic (EGG), and videoendoscopic signals. The multimodal explorations are stored on a relational database, together with the patient's personal information, anamnesis, diagnosis, visits, explorations and any other comment that the specialist may wish to include. The application was initially developed to be used as a desktop tool, so it was necessary to add new functionalities that would let the experts interact among them sharing the information recorded trough the Internet. In this sense, the application has been migrated to be compliant with the client/server paradigm paying special attention to the encryption of the data stored and exchanged. The improvements presented let speech therapists, phoniatricians and ENT professionals interact in a collaborative way, reducing the number of explorations suffered by the patient, improving the assistance process, and therefore reducing significantly the costs associated as well as the time dedicated to each patient. The paper highlights the security problems that appear in the aforementioned scenario and provides solutions that let the experts interact among them ciphering the data stored as well as the communications in a transparent way. The solution presented has been integrated in the available tool, and its performance has been evaluated in a real context under the new premises. Results suggest that, despite the huge amount of data exchanged, in those communication environments with a nominal speed over 100Mbit/s is possible to ensure a real time interaction among specialists keeping the confidentiality.
ciphering diagnosis of voice disorders multimodal databases client/server application online collaborative environment