Architecture for Integrating Healthcare Services to the Brazilian Digital TV System

As Brazil´s interactive Digital TV System (iDTV) is getting impulse, with a strong belief of government and industry that this new system will bring together new economic opportunities, several proposals for extending the potential of TV interactivity to provide innovative services have being proposed nowadays. In this context, the Healthcare is one of the concepts being studied. Healthcare relates to caring about health, preventing diseases, improving the quality o life, and its applications may support hospitals, elderly care centers and similar institutions. Integrating Healthcare technology with home devices is a new trend. Indeed this work aims to investigate new ways for communicating medical devices with the Brazilian iDTV. The solution here proposed is a software platform based on the so called home gateway, which is in charge of interconnecting all medical devices with the iDTV set. As proof of concept two implementation scenarios for measuring the heart beat frequency and the blood pressure were built. All the procedures related to the integration are detailed. We believe this work will be useful in this new field, bringing alternative ways for using common devices and the iDTV to improve the quality of life to the home user.