The BONAPARTE telemedicine ATM multimedia applications

The BONAPARTE (Broadband Optical Network using ATM PON Access facilities in Realistic Telecommunications Environments) project under the EU ACTS Programme is making extensive use of multimedia and broadband ATM access technologies to deploy new advanced telemedicine applications for small health care customers in the field of medical imaging. This paper presents the different stages followed in the project to define and develop the interactive, fully integrated advanced services and high-usability BONAPARTE telemedicine applications: 1) the user requirements analysis of user needs; 2) the enhancement and further development of an existing Telemedicine ATM Multimedia Platform, developed by the authors' research team in previous research projects; 3), the BONAPARTE telemedicine terminal, comprising the platform and the specific telemedicine applications specified in the project, and a presentation of the applications user interfaces is also shown; and finally 4) the continuous usability design and evaluation methodology is briefly presented here in, to assure the final fulfilment of the users' needs by these innovative broadband applications and services. The generic hardware/software platform comprises a set of telemedicine services that have been structured to develop the required highly interactive and integrated telemedicine applications. These services are: syncronous cooperative work, high-quality videconference, multimedia mail, medical image digitizing, processsing, storing and printing, and local and remote transparent database access. The medical information handled by the platform conforms to the DICOM 3.0 (ACR-NEMA) and MEDICOM (CEN) standards. The BONAPARTE telemedicine applications provide the functions required to support four generic scenarios: 1) teleconsultation/teleradiology; 2) real-time medical imaging cooperative diagnosis between two geographically separated physicians; 3) telepresence in a clinical session; and 4) remote access to long-archive medical images.