| Large populations of people around the world suffer from a lack of access to, and the availability of competent medical care. Telemedicine can be used as a powerful tool to assist in the delivery of medical care to these peoples. This study develops a telecommunication system architecture to deliver the most technically demanding telemedicine specialties, Teleradiology and Robotic Telesurgery to these geographic areas. The system focuses on the delivery of these services to Lesser Developed Countries via a hybrid wired and satellite telecommunications infrastructure connected to centers of Telemedicine excellence located in well developed countries. A baseline requirements specification is developed including bandwidth on demand, controlled latency and jitter, and end-to-end data security. A Telecommunication system architecture is developed based on the ATM/AAL1 protocol, JPEG and MPEG data compression, and includes end-to-end data encryption using the AES algorithm. An analysis of the use of a LEO and GEO satellite platforms is performed. A result of the analysis of these satellite platforms demonstrates that at this time due to the stringent delay and jitter requirement of the Robotic Telesurgery service no satellite platform is suitable. The remaining effort was therefore focused on the use of a GEO platform for the delivery of Teleradiology services. Mathematical simulation and modeling is used to perform a top level validation of the final architectural system. The simulation demonstrates that the prime technical requirements are met. |
