Preliminary assessment of telemedicine systems using virtual testbed

Telemedicine is the use of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) infrastructures to provide medical services. It is needed in Indonesia, particularly in remote areas where the number of medical facilities and specialist doctors are limited. BPPT has developed telemedicine systems which can provide tele-ECG, tele-USG, and tele-Consultation. Its feasibility requires some verification on its intended operations. Two kinds of experiments were conducted with focus on security and performance aspects. Medical data needs a system that can ensure three targets of security: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The system relies on some security validation modules; and in this case the focus in on signing and verification modules. These modules rely on DCMTK (DICOM toolkit), an open-source software package that implements large parts of DICOM standard. This package is integrated into the system, which involves various software integration and automated scripts. Lack of network qualities may impact telemedicine services severely. It is usually assumed that network infrastructures in remote areas contribute to the problems. This is represented by the network connecting the three major components, i.e. telemedicine cart, telemedicine central server, and teleconference server. In this experiment, the bottleneck bandwidth was varied from 64, 128, 256, 512, till 1024 Kbps. Each instance of bottleneck bandwidth was the basis for performance measures. This paper presents a virtual testbed for testing telemedicine systems, and shows some assessment results on their security and performance aspects.(EMS2022)