A Low Bandwidth Solution for Telemedicine Application Event Synchronisation using JMF
Authors
Abstract
Telemedicine is becoming an essential tool insupporting the delivery of medical care and knowledge.
In many situations a store-and-forward strategy may be
applied in developing telemedicine services to enable
discussion among clinical experts. However, a perfectly
synchronized distributed environment has to be
guaranteed during on-line medical discussion in order
to avoid potentially critical misunderstandings. To
promote dissemination of telemedicine services, it is
desirable that cheap consumer level infra-structures
are applied to implement these solutions. This is a
major challenge for today's distributed object
synchronization mechanisms, due to the limited
bandwidth and best effort service provided by the
internet.
In this paper, an extension to JMF (Java Media
Framework) is presented to enable the synchronous
exchange of application events and voice streams in low
bandwidth networks. The strategy employed is built
upon a simple event dictionary and an event
registration procedure. Practical tests have shown that
this mechanism enables adequate setup and
synchronization of distributed medical environments
with an overhead of 1Kbps