Abstract
The increase in the availability of bandwidth for wireless links, network integration, and the computational power on fixed and mobile platforms at affordable costs allows nowadays for the handling of audio and video data, their quality making them suitable for medical application. These information streams can support both continuous monitoring and emergency situations. According to this scenario, the authors have developed and implemented the mobile communication system which is described in this paper. The system is based on ITU-T H.323 multimedia terminal recommendation, suitable for real-time data/video/audio and telemedical applications. The audio and video codecs, respectively, H.264 and G723.1, were implemented and optimized in order to obtain high performance on the system target processors. Offline media streaming storage and retrieval functionalities were supported by integrating a relational database in the hospital central system. The system is based on low-cost consumer technologies such as general packet radio service (GPRS) and wireless local area network (WLAN or WiFi) for lowband data/video transmission. Implementation and testing were carried out for medical emergency and telemedicine application. In this paper, the emergency case study is described.
Highlights
Wired and wireless communication technologies can strongly help providing health care in several situations
The portable unit, with wireless access point and WiFi embedded into personal digital assistant (PDA) or Tablet-PC, allows for health care operators or trained patients to send real-time video from the place where health care processes are needed, to the suitcase that is placed in the neighborhood
The quality is evaluated using the SNR Y, measured by the jm6.0a [20] test model. From these results we observe that the proposed approach simplifies the encoder complexity achieving from 50% to 60% encoding time reduction in typical videosurveillance and video-telephony sequences
Summary
Wired and wireless communication technologies can strongly help providing health care in several situations. Real-time transmission, storage, and retrieval of vital parameters are nowadays possible. Health data can be evaluated in real-time or offline after storage. Real-time health parameter transmission in emergency situations can be crucial. In a previous project on multimedia functionalities in telemedicine systems, we used custom electronic cards and professional transmission network (e.g., Tetra). This approach is suitable (often required) for a network mainly connecting people working in the medical area. In a scenario where large number of citizens ask for continuous monitoring, prompt intervention, and interaction with medical establishment, further requirements should be evaluated in order to provide new services at affordable costs. A possible solution would be to use standard equipment (less custom made as possible), commercial networks and to implement widely usable man-machine interfaces
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