A PACKET-BASED TELEMEDICINE SYSTEM FOR COMMUNICATING INFORMATION BETWEEN CENTRAL MONITORING STATIONS AND REMOTE PATIENT MONITORING STATIONS

摘要

The present invention provides a packet-based telemedicine system forcommunicating video, voice and medical data between a central monitoringstation and a patient monitoring station which is remotely-located withrespect to the central monitoring station. The patient monitoring stationobtains digital video, voice and medical measurement data from a patient andencapsulates the data in packets and sends the packets over a network to thecentral monitoring station. Since the information is encapsulated in packets,the information can be sent over multiple types or combinations of networkarchitectures, including a Community access Television (CATV) network, thePublic Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), the Integrated Services DigitalNetwork (ISDN), the Internet, a local area network (LAN), a wide area network(WAN), over a wireless communications network, or over an asynchronoustransfer mode (ATM) network. Thus, a separate transmission protocol is notrequired for each different type of transmission media. Rather, a singletransport/network layer protocol is used for encapsulating the information inpackets at the sending end and for de-encapsulating the information at thereceiving end. Furthermore, by sending the information in packets, the video,voice and measurement data can be integrated and sent over a single network.