Making advanced Telemedicine affordable

Telemedicine becomes increasingly important, especially in rural areas or for rare diseases requiring an expert’s opinion. Due to the widespread use of proprietary communication protocols, existing telemedicine approaches can only incorporate a subset of relevant medical devices. Thus, the remote physician is dependent on on-site colleagues and video-based reading of the device and medical parameters. According to Ackerman et al. [1] vendorindependent medical device interoperability and plug-and-play functionality as well as the lack of standardization are key problem that have to be solved for future telemedicine systems. Therefore, we state that an open standard for medical device communication does not only enable locally interconnected medical systems but is also vital for creating comprehensive telemedicine systems. In this paper we describe a system for local device interoperability based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that is proposed for standardization in the IEEE 11073 family. Because the new architecture is designed mainly for hospitals, we focus on telemedicine for this environment. We introduce a comprehensive telemedicine system, which enables remote monitoring and control, based on this architecture. The whole system extension for telemedicine is comprised of cost-efficient ofthe-shelf components. This will build the basis for affordable telemedicine.