An architecture for m-health services: the CONCERTO project solution

The provisioning of e-health and specifically m-health services requires the usage of advanced and reliable communication techniques to offer acceptable Quality of Experience (QoE) for doctors in the transfer of biomedical data between involved parties (i.e. flawless, or almost flawless, and prompt enough delivery) using wired or wireless access networks. To overcome the restrictions of conventional communication systems and to address the challenges imposed by wireless/mobile multimedia transfer and adaptation for healthcare applications, the CONCERTO project proposes a cross-layer optimized architecture with all the needed critical building blocks integrated for medical media content fusion, delivery and access, even on the move in emergency contexts. This paper describes the proposed reference system architecture, presenting the developed components and mechanisms in a comprehensive way, depicting and clarifying the overall picture and highlighting the impact of the CONCERTO approach in the healthcare domain. The evaluation of the proposed system is carried out both via simulation analysis and, more importantly, via validation involving real medical staff.