Open-Source Telemedicine Platform for Wireless Medical Video Communication

An m-health system for real-time wireless communication of medical video based on open-source software is presented. The objective is to deliver a low-cost telemedicine platform which will allow for reliable remote diagnosis m-health applications such as emergency incidents, mass population screening, and medical education purposes. The performance of the proposed system is demonstrated using five atherosclerotic plaque ultrasound videos. The videos are encoded at the clinically acquired resolution, in addition to lower, QCIF, and CIF resolutions, at different bitrates, and four different encoding structures. Commercially available wireless local area network (WLAN) and 3.5G high-speed packet access (HSPA) wireless channels are used to validate the developed platform. Objective video quality assessment is based on PSNR ratings, following calibration using the variable frame delay (VFD) algorithm that removes temporal mismatch between original and received videos. Clinical evaluation is based on atherosclerotic plaque ultrasound video assessment protocol. Experimental results show that adequate diagnostic quality wireless medical video communications are realized using the designed telemedicine platform. HSPA cellular networks provide for ultrasound video transmission at the acquired resolution, while VFD algorithm utilization bridges objective and subjective ratings

Quantifying subjective quality evaluations for mobile video watching in a semi-living lab context

This paper discusses results from an exploratory study in which Quality of Experience aspects related to mobile video watching were investigated in a semi-living lab setting. More specifically, we zoom in on usage patterns in a natural research context and on the subjective evaluation of high and low-resolution movie trailers that are transferred to a mobile device using two transmission protocols for video (i.e., real-time transport protocol and progressive download using HTTP). User feedback was collected by means of short questionnaires on the mobile device, combined with traditional pen and paper diaries. The subjective evaluations regarding the general technical quality, perceived distortion, fluentness of the video, and loading speed are studied and the influence of the transmission protocol and video resolution on these evaluations is analyzed. Multinomial logistic regression results in a model to estimate the subjective evaluations regarding the perceived distortion and loading speed based on objectively-measured parameters of the video session

Modeling, Simulation and Analysis of Video Streaming Errors in Wireless Wideband Access Networks

Analysis of simulated models has become a veritable tool for investigating network behavioral patterns vis-à-vis transmitted content. The streaming video research domain employs modeling extensively due to availability of relevant tools. A vast majority of which are presented on the FOSS platform. The transmission of audio and video streaming services over different media is becoming ever more popular. This widespread increase is accompanied by the difficult task of maintaining the QoS of streaming video. The use of very accurate coding techniques for transmissions over wireless networks alone cannot guarantee a complete eradication of distortions characteristic of the video signal. A software- hardware composite system has been developed for investigating the effect of single bit error and bit packet errors in wideband wireless access systems on the quality of H.264/AVC standard video streams. Numerical results of the modeling and analysis of the effect of interference robustness on quality of video streaming are presented and discussed. Analytic results also suggest that the Markov model of packetization of error obtained from a real network for streaming video can be used in the simulations of transmission of video across networks in the hardware- software complex developed by the authors in a previous work