OpenTera: A Framework for Telehealth Applications

Summary

OpenTera is a microservice-based framework primarily developed to support telehealth research projects and real-world deployment. This project has 20 years of experience linking at-home participants to remote users (such as clinicians, researchers, healthcare, and professionals) with audio-video-data connections and in-the-field sensors, such as biometrics, wearable, and robotics devices. Applications of the OpenTera framework are not limited to research projects and could exist in clinical environments. Most telehealth-based research projects require a common data structure: data collection sites, projects, participants, and sessions, including various recorded data types from sensors or other sources. They also require standard features: user authentication based on various access roles, the ability to add new features based on specific project needs, ease of use for the participant, and secure data hosting. These features are also shared between research projects: videoconferencing with specific health-related features (e.g., angles measurement, timers), surveys data collection, data analysis, and exportation. Many available solutions are costly, feature-limited, proprietary (e.g., can hardly be adapted for research purposes, and raw data is more complex to access), or hard to deploy in telehealth. OpenTera was built for extensibility to provide research projects complete control over their data and hosting.