3G Embedded Communication System for Medical Applications

The increasing availability of a variety of wireless access technologies provides users with access to critical content and applications. In medical applications, reliability and ubiquity must be guaranteed by new communication technologies in order to favour their adoption. Ensuring a satisfactory quality of service and a high degree of availability requires a reliable delivery system that optimally brings together several wireless access systems and medical-based platforms into an efficient trial product to satisfy operational needs. This paper proposes a novel system architecture to support adaptive real-time medical applications, possibly multimedia-based, over various wireless technologies. The system addresses several issues associated with the successful operation of applications running over heterogeneous networks. First, it defines a layer of abstraction to isolate the applications from the actual transport system. Second, it uses a message-based protocol to improve the reliability and security of the communications over different access systems. Finally, it includes adaptation mechanisms for various system statuses. A real-life healthcare application capable of transmitting voice, video and medical data simultaneously is used for validation. Experimental results are reported that demonstrate the viability of the approach.