Telemedicine methods for low bit rate communication

Telemedicine using images usually requires high bit rate networks. In this work we investigated two scenarios for low bit rate communications: prepared teleconsultations (PT) and emergency teleconsultations (ET). In prepared teleconsultations multimedia objects can be earlier downloaded by each site and used in the synchronized event-driven architecture. We implemented a Java programming language Robot class which enables control of a remote graphical user interface. The local events are mapped to remote events. Their serialized versions are send to remote stations and executed. The required bandwidth is reduced to about kilobyte/second. In emergency teleconsultations the data object is encoded using JPEG 2000 and transmitted using scale and quality progression features. Using those features it is possible to control quality of the image in the region of interest. Concluding only required part of the image is send with the highest quality which leads to the reduction of the required bandwidth.