Interactive personal digital assistant based telemedicine system using wireless local area network

Abstract

This research work is inspired by the emergence of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology which have progressed drastically over the past few years. By integrating those technologies into conventional telemedicine system, a simpler method of Interactive Data Communication (IDC) between PDA and medical equipment for wireless and mobile telemedicine system is proposed. As compared to conventional designs which were using proprietary PDA application for only particular medical equipment, a common PDA based application which enables the interoperability for different medical equipments is designed in order to contribute toward a cost-effective telemedicine system. The proposed method is based on the client-server network architecture, which is a client application developed on PDA and a server application developed on desktop. Basically, the proposed method for wireless and mobile telemedicine system consists of two parts: 1) The Patient Unit, which is set up around the patient to acquire the patients’ physiological signals and video signals by interfacing to desktop. 2) The Mobile Monitoring Unit, a PDA which enables user to monitor the patient’s condition anytime and anywhere within the coverage range. The physiological data are acquired from an electronic stethoscope, patient simulator, oscilloscope and PC camera. A serial control application and a video capture application are developed for patient simulator and PC camera respectively while the smart electronic stethoscope application and the Free View application are being adopted for electronic stethoscope and oscilloscope respectively to interface the desktop. The PDA user is able to monitor the physiological data remotely within the coverage of WLAN or off-site area through internet by using the client application at PDA and server application at desktop. The result shows that the IDC method achieves average 105ms in latency test with electrocardiogram waveforms, zero transmission error in reliability test, average 150 minutes in power-sustainability for power-consumption test, 97% in accessibility within 110 meter range for mobility test, 100% in identifiability for signal-quality test, 66.5%, 88.5% and 84% in satisfactory for scalability test, simplicity test and interoperability test respectively. As the conclusion, an interactive PDA based telemedicine system using WLAN has been successfully implemented in this thesis.