Designing Multimedia Quality-based AdvancedVideoconferencing Applicationsfor Telemedicine over the Internet

摘要

Telemedicine and related healthcare technologies aim to provide efficient healthcare to improve the well being of patientsrnand bring medical expertise at a lower cost to people who are geographically separated. This field has evolved over the pastrnthirty years and today most telemedicine applications still use expensive leased telecommunication circuits to providernsecured reliable connections. With the ubiquity of the Internet, it is now possible to deliver healthcare through Internet-basedrntelemedicine applications to a wider population. However, the unreliable connection properties of packet-based systems andrntheir vulnerability to various impairments that can occur at the physical, network, and application levels hamper the quality ofrnInternet-based telemedicine applications. This research developed a taxonomy that identifies several key telemedicinerndimensions to help patients, providers and program administrators understand the effort. The next phases of the study willrncreate new objective/subjective multimedia quality models exclusively for telemedicine over the Internet using anrnexperimental design over an emulated testbed. These models will be developed for telediagnosis in ophthalmology andrnmental health with extensive experiments using real-world telemedicine multimedia sessions obtained from the RegenstriefrnInstitute for Health Care and VA. Finally, an intelligent videoconferencing software will be developed with real-time qualityrnfeedback functionality based on the quality models developed during this study. This new artifact will help practitioners inrnthe field to pursue telemedicine confidently with the knowledge of real-time quality conditions under which they operate.