AROGYASREE
An Internet Based
Principal
Investigators:
Prof. Dr. D. Janakiram Prof. Dr. Wilhem Stork
1. Introduction
2. How the telemedicine system
(Arogyasree) works?
3. Publications
About 70% of
the population in
A goal of the
Arogyasree project is to bring the expertise of doctors in the urban areas
closer to the patients in the rural areas. The telecommunications and Internet
infrastructure in
The sheer
number of underprivileged masses calls for the implementation of a large-scale
telemedicine solution capable of managing the enormous amounts of patient data
and providing medical services across the country. This gives rise to several
issues such as scalability, robustness, cost-effectiveness, coverage width,
context-awareness etc.
Figure 1. Life cycle of a patient request in
Arogyasree
Arogyasree
(figure 1) is a context-aware, P2P data grid framework for mobile telemedicine.
This Internet-based scalable system integrates multiple hospitals, mobile
medical specialists and rural mobile units/clinics to form a large virtual
enterprise.
Figure 2. Telemedicine Kit
Arogyasree supports mobility both at the doctor's and the patient's
end. Trained nurses in rural health centres can carry portable instruments for
measuring vital health parameters such as blood pressure, electrocardiogram,
blood sugar, weight, etc. These devices are wirelessly (Bluetooth/ZigBee)
connected with a Smartphone, which transfers the data into our data Grid.
Schedulers in the Grid can then find appropriate physicians to forward requests
to. Willing physicians can make an evaluation of the measuring data and can
provide consultations/therapeutic instructions by telephone/Internet.
The Arogyasree
project receives support from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and
is collaborative work with Prof. Wilhelm Stork's team at the University of
Karlsruhe, Germany. The team in
2.
How the telemedicine system (Arogyasree) works?
Step 1: Patient registers
with the system
Step 2: The patient gets an id on registration.
This id will be encoded into a
smart card.
Step 3: Uploading the patient request onto the data
grid.
The health worker captures the ECG from the patient using the ECG jacket
which is then transferred to the PDA of the health worker. The patient id, category of ailment, and location
are provided as inputs.
Step 4: Request gets
redirected to a capable node in the data grid for being served.
The health worker specifies the mobile no., ECG image file and other
attributes of the patient and uploads the request.
Step 5: The system schedules
the request.
The doctors are already registered with the system (with their area of
expertise). The request is scheduled to a nearby available doctor by means of
SMS/email. The doctor can then look at the patient request on the PDA and
provide the response. The doctor can also view the past history of the patient.
Step 6: The doctor provides the response which is
relayed to the health worker.
3. Publications
1. Sriram Kailasam,
Santosh Kumar, D. Janakiram:
Mobile Telemedicine using Data Grid,
International Conference on Communication, Convergence and Broadband Networking
(ICCBN 2008), Bangalore, July 2008.
2. Sriram Kailasam,
Santosh Kumar, D. Janakiram: Arogyasree: An enhanced
grid-based approach to mobile telemedicine, accepted in International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications, Feb 2010.
3. P. Kovendhan,
D. Janakiram: Arogyashree: a
Distributed File System for Large Scale Internet-Based Telemedicine, in
Proceedings of the International Workshop on Mobilizing Health Information to
Support Healthcare-related Knowledge Work – MobiHealthInf
2009, INSTICC Press, Portugal.
The Arogyasree project was demoed at CEBIT
2009. Here is a link to the videos. demo