Performance evaluation of WWW conference system for supporting remote mental health care education

摘要

Recently in Japan, the mental health care has become a very important issue because there are many people suffering from mental problems. Also, there are only few specialists and researchers to deal with these problems. The information technology (IT) has changed our life. People can communicate between them and students can study various courses at anywhere and anytime using the Internet. The IT can be helpful for mental health care, education, aftercare and counseling for patients and their families. It is very important to decrease the moving time because there are very few mental healthcare specialists. Also, it is very important to see the facial expression and speak to the people for mental healthcare education, aftercare and counseling. For this reason, the video and voice are needed. But, it is not easy to use the conventional TV conference systems for general people, mental health care specialists and their students because they are not computer specialists. In order to realize a remote mental health care education, we have developed a WWW conference system. Our system can communicate between the mental health care specialists and their students. Also, our system can provide the communication between the mental health care specialists, patients and their families by using the live video on WWW browser, point to point communication, point to multi point communication and multi point to multi point communication. In this paper, we show the implementation of proposed system.