An innovative WebRTC solution for e-Health services

Abstract

Solutions and services for e-Health and telemedicine are constantly spreading and becoming increasingly important in the health area thanks to last innovations in electronics, informatics and telecommunications. This work proposes an innovative service for the e-Health oriented to the maximum ease of use and to the sharing of vital signs. The proposal consists in a tele-counseling service based on the WebRTC technology that allows any person residing remotely from medical staff or hospital to directly interact with them. Our solution provides all the common functions of the WebRTC, such as real-time video and audio streams, instant messaging, and file sharing with the only requirement of a traditional web browser. Beyond that, we implemented the real-time transmission and visualization of vital signs and parameters acquired by biomedical sensors connected to the patient's personal device through the RTCDataChannel. Currently our solution involves the installation of a browser extension, but this operation is very simple and may be avoided when WebRTC APIs and browsers will support media streams coming from sensors at the same way as audio and video streams. Our solution demonstrates how web technologies can be applied in the health sector providing very effective services to patients and users which for various reasons have difficulties to travel to hospitals in order to have medical support.