Implementation of virtual medical devices in Internet and wireless cellular networks

Telemedical systems work in heterogeneous processing environment and require a flexible system reconfiguration. Physician may switch from a personal digital assistant to a high performance - high resolution workstation very often, expecting the telemedical system to reconfigure and provide the support within seconds. In this paper we present a telemedical virtual collaborative environment based on Internet and wireless cellular network technologies. We apply a novel concept of interactive Virtual Medical Devices (VMD) and merge remote data acquisition, distributed processing, and data presentation. Using VMD we have integrated spatially distributed functions: I/O at patient side, data processing, and presentation at physician side. Data acquisition is performed by remote medical device or medical sensor. Data processing is distributed and involves sophisticated real-time signal processing algorithms. We developed three VMD interfaces for data presentation and data distribution: WWW HTML interface, WAP WML interface, and GSM SMS interface. We have applied VMDs to facilitate distributed analysis of electroencephalogram (EEG) data in Internet environment.