The Development and Implementation of a Multimedia Messaging Service for an Enhanced Mobile Telemedicine System

This paper presents an algorithm and architechture to enhance the performance of a mobile telemedicine system using the existing multimedia messaging service (MMS). With the proposed algorithm, the capacity of the MMS can be increased so that the mobile telemedicine system is able to send and receive a large content of multimedia messages using mobile phone devices which is not possible with the conventional MMS. This paper also presents the complete architechture of the mobile telemedicine system which can form the basis for building a practical mobile telemedicine system. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional MMS with regard to the file size that can be transmitted without degrading the quality of the data which is important for medical diagnosis in a telemedicine environment. DOI: 10.4018/jhisi.2012010102 14 International Journal of Healthcare Information Systems and Informatics, 7(1), 13-30, January-March 2012 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. to transfer data. Many service providers use general packet radio service (GPRS), which can transmit data up to 115 Kbps and some of them use universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) with a speed of 384 Kbps (Bodic, 2005; Setyono, Alam, & Al-Saqour, 2009). They also have different maximal data size for sending multimedia messages to mobile phone number and email server, and it is in the range of 50 – 100 KB (Setyono et al., 2009; Bodic, 2003). Currently, the MMS is widely used for exchanging greeting cards, audio and video recordings, exchanging photographs and so on. The MMS can also be used for developing mobile monitory system, streaming audio and video (Bodic, 2003), mobile commerce (Daniel, 2004), information system (Jari, 2004), telemedicine system (Bernard et al., 2011), etc. Telemedicine field is one of the research areas of biomedical engineering that needs multidisciplinary technologies such as, electronics, computer, telecommunications, transfer protocol, medical procedures, etc. (Yoke et al., 2006). The telemedicine is a part of telehealth, which relies on telecommunication systems to interact with and monitor patients at distance (Asadullah et al., 2008). A telemedicine system serves as an effective tool to enhance the quality of health care service remotely (Ashraf, 2008). The telemedicine system in general uses a high level of technology and therefore it requires a huge amount of money to provide the necessary hardware and software (Yoke et al., 2006). Conventional telemedicine system using public switched telephone network (PSTN) land lines are already available to enable a doctor to monitor a patient remotely for home care or emergency applications. In recent years, many telemedicine applications are employing mobile technologies, such as mobile telemedicine using MMS (Asadullah, 2008; Ashraf, 2008), WAP (Kevin & Yuan, 2003), 3G network (Yuechun & Aura, 2004; Polley et al., 2006), etc. The telemedicine applications can also be developed using radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) (Yang & Hui, 2008). This paper presents a system to show how the existing MMS capacity can be increased to build a mobile telemedicine system (MTS) using Java 2 micro edition (J2ME) technology. This paper also presents the whole architecture, algorithm and application of the MMS for the MTS. The benefits of the proposed technique are: (i) It provides a viable solution to send large amount of data exceeding the limit which is currently not possible with the existing MMS technology. (ii) It preserves the quality of the image that is transmitted which is essential for medical diagnosis in a telemedicine environment. (iii) It provides a secured scheme to transmit medical data. (iv) It provides a basis for building a practical telemedicine system The remaining part of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses methods of the research. Results of the research are presented in Section 3. Discussions are presented in Section 4 and conclusion and future work are presented in Section 5.