WISTA: A wireless telemedicine system for disaster patient care

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a low-cost and easy-to-deploy wireless telemedicine system, denoted WISTA, that can assist on-site patient care during disasters. The proposed system facilitates real-time transfer of multimedia data from video cameras, sensors, medical images and text from multiple disaster sites to the control center of the disaster area. WISTA enables disaster managers to obtain patients' status information in real-time from the entire disaster site, which can assist the timely diagnosis as well as the treatment of patients. Moreover, the disaster managers in the control center can remotely control the information sent from the individual disaster sites. The proposed system uses a hierarchical architecture which allows scalable implementation. For dense disaster areas, a layered structure is applied to support information dissemination from s large number of patients. We have implemented the system prototype over a wireless channel and successfully demonstrated simultaneous transmission of video, sensor information, medical images and text from multiple sites to the control center. In addition, the scalability of the system is evaluated using OPNET simulation. Both experiments validate our system design. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.