A portable medical system using real-time streaming transport over 3G wireless networks

The paper proposes architecture for the software implementation of a multimedia, tele-medicine system. It considers video streaming from both video servers in hospitals and webcams localized to patients. It also considers transmission of vital bio-signs, such as heart rates and blood pressure, etc. All these data are transmitted over a 3G-wireless communication system to various client devices (hand-held devices, such as PDAs) used by physicians and nurses. Our video codec is a software implementation of the MPEG-4 standard, compression rate at about 1/24 sizes suited for available transmitting bandwidth. Moreover, our design, which also integrates the processing of heart sounds, supports a 44.1 KHz sampling rate and a 16-bit representation required about 11 kbps bandwidth. At the same time, in the streaming process, we propose a congestion control scheme to reduce packet losses.