Innovative solution for a telemedicine application

摘要

Current world issues such as ageing population and health professional shortage can be minimized through effective use of technology advancements. In this regard, telemedicine can help majority of the population residing in rural areas to have access to better medical care by implementing technology solution such as videoconferencing for distant tele-consultations. Current videoconferencing solutions in market are not particularly designed to provide acceptable performance in low speed networks. This paper discusses developing an innovative videoconferencing application which will be able to function satisfactorily under network speed as low as 128kbps. Several existing technology solutions such as bandwidth adaptive streaming, advanced video compression algorithms and dynamic image cropping with the help of depth sensing camera are employed to reduce the data size significantly and thus to ensure smooth audio/video transmission in low bandwidth networks. Empirical data show that this application is able to maintain a minimum frame rate of 13fps at all the time. Testing of this application is found to be performing better than off-the-shelf videoconferencing applications in terms of frame rate alone.