Applicability of H.264 in telemedicine reference model

Health care is a critical social issue in all over the world nowadays, especially in small town or rural areas where expert doctors, nurses, electronic equipments and other infrastructures are not adequate. As a promising approach to address this issue, telemedicine has received much attention. Telemedicine is a multimedia application where real time video, audio, text, graphics and vital signs are transmitted through the existing telecommunication facilities. Video data is the most dominant part in terms of information contribution of telemedicine electronic signal. However it requires huge bandwidth among the other components of signals. Reducing the transmission bit rates concomitantly obtaining the acceptable video quality is still a big challenge for researchers in telemedicine applications in real-time through the band-limited wired or wireless channels, especially through the latter one which accommodates only very low-bit transmission. This paper introduces an advanced video transmission platform based on H.264 compression standard. The efficiency and effectiveness of the presented platform are demonstrated by experimental results.