System integration for medical data dissemination and multimedia communication in the implementation of Tele-ECG and teleconsultation

One of the options to extend medical services coverage is deploying a telemedicine system, where medical personnel make use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to overcome distance and time constraints. The implementation of telemedicine systems in Indonesia faces challenges posed by the lack of ICT infrastructure availability, such as communication networks, data centres, and other computing resources. To deal with these challenges, a telemedicine innovation needs to produce a modular and flexible system that is adaptive to medical services needed and the available ICT infrastructure. This paper presents research and development of a telemedicine system prototype for tele-electrocardiography (tele-ECG) and teleconsultation. The contributions offered are integrating system from various open-source modules and the system operational feasibility based on its function and performance. The research is conducted on a testbed which represents various components involved in the telemedicine system operation. Experiments are carried out to assess the system functionality and observe whether tele-ECG and teleconsultation reach their expected performance. Experiment results show that the system works properly and recommend several multimedia communication modes to achieve the target quality based on the available network bandwidth.This paper has presented the research and development of a telemedicine system prototype, for tele-ECG and teleconsultation applications. The prototype developed provides a flexible framework with configurations that can be adapted to conditions in the field. This prototype consists of several components, hardware and software, that provides an end-to-end solution. The components include medical devices as ECG sensors on the patient side, telemedicine carts/workstations for the aggregation of medical devices and interfaces to network infrastructure, servers, and modules for medical data storage, conversion,transmission, and retrieval, and video conferencing systems for teleconsultation. This system may play a role in assisting the government in expanding e-Health applications as mandated in the 2014-2019 broadband plan and improving health services in Indonesia.(EMS2022)