A NOVEL LOW COST TELEMEDICINE SYSTEM USING WIRELESS MESH NETWORK E. Supriyanto 1 , H. Satria 2 , I.H. Mulyadi 2 and E.H. Putra 2 1 Faculty of Biomedical Engineering and Health Science 2 Faculty of Electrical Engineering Universiti Teknologi Malaysia ABSTRACT Telemedicine promises an improvement of health care service quality in rural, urban, dense and mobile areas. In order to implement the telemedicine in these areas, a low cost telemedicine system with acceptable quality for medical data transfer is required. This paper discusses simulation and implementation results of a low cost telemedicine system including wireless medical interface and communication infrastructure. A simulation has been done to investigate the network quality of service. The infrastructure has been also implemented using low cost 5.8 GHz transceiver for backhauls and low cost 2.4 GHz transceiver for clients. Test result shows that the low cost telemedicine system is able to do real time communication between patient and medical staff with medical data rate up to 2 Mbps. It shows that the low cost telemedicine system using wireless mesh network can be implemented in remote area with acceptable medical data transfer quality. 1. INTRODUCTION Telemedicine is an emerging technology which combining telecommunication and information technology for medical practice. It gives a new way to deliver health care services when the distance between doctor and patient is significantly away. Telemedicine can deliver health care services to the patient even in remote area. Pavlopoulos et al. (1998) has presented an example of telemedicine advantage with implementation on ambulatory patient care at remote area. Another application has been done by Sudhamony et al. (2008) for cancer care in rural area. High technology telemedicine application in surgery has already been developed by Xiaohui et al. (2007). Currently, the telemedicine uses available wired and wireless infrastructures. Telemedicine infrastructures with wired network have been proposed by Al-Taei (2005) using Integrated Service Digital Network (ISDN), Asynchronous Transfer Modes (ATM) by Cabral & Kim (1996), Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) by Pandian et al. (2007) and Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) by Ling et al. (2005). Telemedicine has also been implemented in wireless network using Wireless LAN (WLAN) proposed by Kugean et al. (2002), Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WIMAX) by Chorbev et al. (2008), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) 1X-EVDO by Yoo et al. (2005), General Packet Radio Switch (GPRS) by Gibson et al. (2003) and 2G Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSM) by Pavlopoulos et al. (1998). Each infrastructure has its own obstacle, in particularly when they are implemented in a remote area. For example, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) had some mobility and scalability limitation, even both networks provide high Quality of Service (QoS) and have stability on delivering data (Nanda et al., 2007). The fragility of 3G UMTS network for telemedicine has been explored by Y. E. Tan et al. (2006), where the implementation costs are high and does not provide enough QoS. Comparison of available network infrastructures and technologies for telemedicine system are summarized in Table 1. It can be shown that based on cost, data rate and mobility, the optimal solution for telemedicine system is Wireless Mesh Network (WMN). In order to investigate the quality and the possibility of using WMN as a telemedicine infrastructure, a simulation of data communication in WMN using NS2 network simulator has been done. Besides, the infrastructure and the medical data interface have been also developed and tested. This is required to create a low cost telemedicine system that has an acceptable quality of service. ― 382 ―