Using HSPA to improve the telemedical links on a moving ambulance

Abstract

Abstract-As the demand for faster and more effective health care increases, there is a growing need to establish mobile, high-speed communications between a moving ambulance and a consultation point (usually a hospital). The recent addition of HSPA (HSDPA and HSUPA) into the UMTS suite provides higher bandwidth and reduced delays, making this choice ideal for real-time telemedical applications.In this paper, we will describe a set of scenarios that took place in a typical large city area, along with their equivalent results: a moving ambulance was linked with a consultation station using HSPA and several videoconferencing sessions were initiated. Best-case, worst-case and average scenarios were recorded. Furthermore, in areas where the UMTS reception was marginal, a repeater was placed on top of the vehicle to boost up the signal power and thus maintain the higher bandwidth. Finally, treating doctors were asked to evaluate the effectiveness of this system's outputs, based on a variety of objective and subjective criteria.

Adaptive Bandwidth Reservation and Scheduling for Efficient Wireless Telemedicine Traffic Transmission

“…This scheme will reserve the proper bandwidth among cells for handoff traffic and, particularly, for handoff telemedicine traffic. This case is the problem that we try to tackle in this paper, for the first time in the relevant literature, to the best of our knowledge (with the exception of a short section in [33], which, however, considers just telemedicine video).…”

“…We also conceptually compare this paper with one practical implementation of telemedicine video traffic [33] and two efficient MAC protocols recently proposed in the literature: one protocol based on WCDMA [36] and one protocol that integrates TDMA, code-division multiple access (CDMA), and carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) [37].…”

“…In [33], the authors studied the possibility of using the highspeed packet access (HSPA) suite, which is an improvement over the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), to transmit telemedicine video traffic. Several videoconference sessions were initiated, and best case, worst case, and average scenarios were recorded as a moving ambulance was linked with a consultation using HSPA.…”

“…Unfortunately, in the cases of 13% of the calls, the patients' arrival to the hospital was delayed for a variety of reasons, mainly having to do with traffic congestion. It is clear, therefore, that ambulances need to provide the patient with health services that would only have been possible, until recently, when the patient would be admitted to the hospital [33].…”

“…Various M-health studies have been conducted within the last few years on very significant aspects of public health [4]- [10], [13], [28], [30]- [35]. In many of these studies, the efficient use of the cellular network resources was of paramount importance for the correct and rapid transmission of all types of telemedicine traffic (video, audio, and data), particularly because only a limited bandwidth could be devoted to the transmission of this very urgent and crucial, for the patients' life, type of traffic (e.g., 40-60 Kb/s in [30], 50-300 Kb/s in [33], 360 Kb/s in [34], and less than 300 Kb/s (downlink) in [35] due to the limitations in the cellular system used in each country and depending on the type of telemedicine traffic transmitted in each study). In [31], the authors suggest that the problem of limited bandwidth in an emergency situation, where the number of patients being transferred in ambulances to the hospital is overwhelming, can only be handled by transmitting vital signs' data to the hospital in a reduced and packed format over a Third-Generation (3G) cellular network.…”