Secured video conferencing desktop client for telemedicine

As a result of growing interest in telemedicine during the last decade, we have seen the development and deployment of several video conferencing telemedicine applications during recent years. Deployment of these applications was on ISDN lines or dedicated circuits since the bandwidth, security, and privacy have been the biggest concern in telemedicine. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling standard that attracts telemedicine application developers since SIP was designed for multimedia communications over IP-based networks and has inherent native mode security mechanisms built in. We have developed a SIP-based video conferencing application that runs over the Internet and can provide authentication using MD5 Digest hashing mechanism. This client is designed to provide voice and video services using SIP, currently being standardized by IETF. The client is also integrated with directory service designed on commObject architecture. The video conferencing client performance and interoperability has been successfully tested. We are now working on deploying it in a telemedicine environment. In a telemedicine setting we will gather data from users in order to evaluate user satisfaction for both physicians and patients. There are additional features we have identified that can enhance the patient physician communication and they will be obtained easily from our client in the future.