A telemedicine application using WebRTC

Abstract

ICT in healthcare businesses has been growing in Portugal in the past few decades. The implementation of large scale information systems in hospitals, the deployment of electronic prescription and electronic patient records applications are just a few examples. Telemedicine is another emergent and widely used ICT solution to smooth the communication between patients and healthcare professionals, by allowing video and voice transfer over the Internet. Although there are several implementations of telemedicine solutions, they usually have some drawbacks, namely: i) too specific for a purpose; ii) based on proprietary applications; iii) require additional software installation; iv) and usually have associated costs. In this paper we propose a telemedicine solution based on WebRTC Application Programming Interface (API) to transmit video and voice in real time over the Internet, through a web browser. Besides microphone and webcam control, we have also included two additional functionalities that may be useful to both patients and healthcare professionals during the communication, namely i) bidirectional sending files capability and ii) shared whiteboard which allows free drawing. The proposed solution uses exclusively open source software components and requires solely a WebRTC compatible web browser, like Google Chrome or Firefox. We have made two types of tests in healthcare environment: i) a bidirectional patient-doctor communication; ii) and connecting at one end an external USB medical device with an integrated webcam. The results were promising, since they revealed the potential of using WebRTC API to control microphone and webcam in a telemedicine application, as well as the appropriateness and acceptance of the features included. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.