A Pervasive Telemedicine System Exploiting the DVB-T Technology Gianmarco Angius, Danilo Pani, Luigi Raffo, Stefano Seruis Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering University of Cagliari 09123 Cagliari, Italy Email: {g.angius,pani,luigi}@diee.unica.it Paolo Randaccio Dept. of Physics University of Cagliari 09042 Monserrato (CA), Italy Email: paolo.randaccio@ca.infn.it Abstract—Telemedicine is a form of remote assistance to patients unable to easily reach the hospitals. The diffusion of such systems depends both on the availability of widespread low-cost platforms and on the ease of use. In this paper, a DVB-T based platform for telemedicine is presented. The proposed system enables to perform simple routine exams through a low-cost Base Station connected to the patient’s DVB-T set-top box, using the remote control and the TV screen as I/O interfaces for the user. The uplink connection is used to send the results to a remote care center. The practice with such home-entertainment equipments allows even elderly people to easily exploit the proposed platform. I. I NTRODUCTION Telemedicine is an interesting example of pervasive health- care system, aimed to enable patients with chronic diseases to be assisted remotely by the care staff without the need for frequent visits to the hospital. Beyond the advantages for the patients, the costs for the public administration can be reduced exploiting low-cost equipments to create the infrastructure. Until now, the largest part of such systems was based on a PC with an internet connection (e.g. [1]) or on expensive dedicated devices (e.g. [2], [3], [4]). Often, they are not intuitive for untrained people (or not conceived with this aim [5]) and then their use is intended only for young people, more accustomed to digital equipments but at the same time not representing the main telemedicine target. Furthermore, if a PC is not present in the patient’s home, the cost to set-up the platform could be high. After 2012, Digital Video Broadcast Terrestrial (DVB-T) will be the only terrestrial television system. Any TV set can be used with DVB-T providing that an external set-top box is properly connected. Taking into account the wide diffusion of TV sets and the very low cost of DVB-T set-top boxes, the development of a telemedicine system based on such technology could represent the answer to the problems raised by the other solutions. In this paper, a prototypal device and the whole system framework for a DVB-T based telemedicine system are pre- sented. In such a system, the patient is able to interact with the health-monitor device through the TV screen and the remote controller of the set-top box. The application running on the set-top box is provided by a Digital Video Broadcaster, so that the software maintenance and upgrade can be easily accomplished without any direct user intervention. The adoption of the interactive set-top box, which embeds a modem for a data uplink connection, allows the transmission to a Remote Care Center of the examination results over the telephone network without a personal computer or any dedicated device. A personal smart card enables the patient to configure the application for his/her needs without any direct intervention. Beyond the standard home entertainment equipments, the system uses a low-cost prototypal Base Station to perform the acquisition of the patient’s signals. This unit is completely controlled by the application running on the set-top box that provides also the interface for the patient. To validate the system we developed a proof-of-concept Base Station limited to the acquisition of a 1-lead electrocardiogram (ECG). The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section II the whole system is introduced; in Section III the application on the set-top-box with the user interface is presented, whereas some details on the hardware Base Station are given in Section IV. In Section V a short description of the application broadcasting technique is given. Section VI concludes this work. II. SYSTEM OVERVIEW The system presented in this paper was conceived to keep as low as possible the costs of the extra-hardware with respect to a minimum setup composed of a TV and a DVB-T set-top box connected to the telephone line. This way the usability by untrained people not accustomed to digital equipments but the TV set one is also preserved. The system is depicted in Figure 1. It is composed of two main parts hosted respectively in the Remote Care Center (RCC) and at the patient’s home. On the RCC there is only a simple PC acting as TCP/IP server. The server receives the data stream and saves some files on a database directory: a patient identification file, providing all the information needed to identify the patient, and some exam data files. For exams such as ECGs, requiring a graphical visualization on the RCC, such data files are accompanied by a header file specifying the information useful for the correct visualization (e.g. sample rate). The same does not hold for exams such as arterial blood pressure, temperature, etc.