Research Article Healthcare Supported by Data Mule Networks in Remote Communities of the Amazon Region Mauro Margalho Coutinho, 1 Alon Efrat, 2 Thienne Johnson, 2 Andrea Richa, 3 and Mengxue Liu 3 1 Centro de Ciˆ encias Exatas e Tecnologia, Universidade da Amazˆ onia, 66060-902 Bel´ em, PA, Brazil 2 Department of Computer Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0077, USA 3 Computer Science and Engineering, CIDSE, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-8809, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Mauro Margalho Coutinho; mauro@margalho.pro.br Received 16 May 2014; Revised 3 September 2014; Accepted 15 September 2014; Published 30 October 2014 Academic Editor: Jehn Ruey Jiang Copyright © 2014 Mauro Margalho Coutinho et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Tis paper investigates the feasibility of using boats as data mule nodes, carrying medical ultrasound videos from remote and isolated communities in the Amazon region in Brazil, to the main city of that area. Te videos will be used by physicians to perform remote analysis and follow-up routine of prenatal examinations of pregnant women. Two open source simulators (the ONE and NS- 2) were used to evaluate the results obtained utilizing a CoDPON (continuous displacement plan oriented network). Te simulations took into account the connection times between the network nodes (boats) and the number of nodes on each boat route. 1. Introduction Data mule is an acronym for (mobile ubiquitous LAN exten- sion). It is related to vehicles that physically carry a computer with a storage device and a limited telecommunication module (usually Wi-Fi) between remote areas in order to efectively create a data communication link [1]. A delay- tolerant network (DTN) is an architecture that provides a common method for interconnecting heterogeneous gate- ways or proxies that employ store-and-forward message routing to overcome communication disruptions [2]. Both technologies are tolerant to disconnections in the network and are ofen complementary. However, despite the fact that these technologies do not adhere to the principle of ubiquitous computing, they open the doors to hundreds of applications whose integration was not possible earlier, mostly due to the high costs, or even infeasibility, of imple- menting a networked infrastructure in some scenarios. One of these scenarios is the Maraj´ o Archipelago, located in the Amazon region of Brazil, which occupies a large fuvial area of 104,142 Km 2 (approximately 40,700 sq mi) [3]. Te largest island on the archipelago, the Marajo Island, has roughly the same size as Switzerland and is the largest island in the world to be surrounded by freshwater. According to the last Brazilian census [4], only 43% of the archipelago’s population of 487,010 inhabitants lives in urban areas. Tere are no bridges linking the islands to the mainland, and boats are by far the main means of transportation in the region. Some cities, like Afua (known as the “Venice of the Amazon”), are completely built on water. In these places, socioinfrastruc- ture problems abound, especially health related problems, as there are few physicians available in the remote communities. Most medical care is done through sporadic government programs that involve the displacement of a team to serve the population, in particular in the outlying areas. Te goal of this paper is to present an alternative telemedicine infrastructure, focused on performing remote triage and prioritization of medical care in these remote regions of the Amazon rain forest. We implement a telemedicine infrastructure over a CoDPON (continuous displacement plan oriented network) data mule system [5], commonly applied in scenarios where nodes have predefned routes. We present a preliminary evaluation of the capabilities of our proposed telemedicine infrastructure by means of simulations. We simulate the Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Scholarly Research Notices Volume 2014, Article ID 730760, 8 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/730760