Delivering Telemedicine Services via a New Hybrid Telecommunications System

Charles von Urff
Campus College Chair for the College of Information Systems and Technology
Southern California Campus of the University of Phoenix

August 31, 2005
CLU - Richter Hall Ahmanson Science Building

Large populations of people around the world suffer from a lack of access to, and the availability of competent medical care. Telemedicine can be used as a powerful tool to assist in the delivery of medical care to these peoples. This presentation discusses a hybrid telecommunication system architecture designed to deliver the most technically demanding telemedicine specialties: i.e. Teleradiology and Robotic Telesurgery to these remote geographic areas.

The system focuses on the delivery of these services to Lesser Developed Countries via a hybrid wired and satellite telecommunications infrastructure connected to centers of Telemedicine excellence located in well-developed countries. A baseline requirements specification was developed including bandwidth on demand, controlled latency and jitter, and end-to-end data security. The Telecommunication system architecture discussed is based on the ATM/AAL1 protocol, JPEG and MPEG data compression, and includes end-to-end data encryption using the AES algorithm. The use of a LEO and GEO satellite platforms is presented. A result of the analysis of these satellite platforms demonstrates that at this time due to the stringent delay and jitter requirement of the Robotic Telesurgery service no current satellite platform is suitable. The remaining effort was therefore focused on the use of a GEO platform for the delivery of Teleradiology services.

Mathematical simulation and modeling is used to perform a top level validation of the final architectural system. The simulation demonstrates that the prime technical requirements are met.

Charles von Urff, PhD

Dr. von Urff has a Ph.D. from Capella University with a specialization in Communications Technology, a Master of Science in Engineering Degree with a specialization in Statistical Communications Theory from Princeton University, and a Bachelors of Electrical Engineering Degree from New York University. Dr. von Urff is currently the Campus College Chair for the College of Information Systems and Technology at the Southern California Campus of the University of Phoenix (UOP). Prior to his working at UOP, Dr. von Urff’s career has been entirely involved in the international high technology arena.

Dr. von Urff started his career at the RCA Research Laboratories in Princeton NJ, later working for companies such as: Texas Instruments, Western Digital and General Instrument Corporation. He has managed public, private and venture funded companies in the semiconductor, high performance computer, and telecommunications businesses. He has developed and brought to market over 25 products ranging from communications VLSI semiconductor products such as the first single chip implementation of X.25 and a number of different implementations of voice CODEC’s, to SIMD parallel processors, to Digital Microwave Radio systems. He is a published author.

Dr. von Urff is a member of: the IEEE, IEEE ComSoc, ACM, the American Telemedicine Association, and the Academy of Management.