Yuechun Chu

A mobile teletrauma system using 3G networks

This paper introduces a cost-effective portable teletrauma system that assists health-care centers in providing prehospital trauma care. Simultaneous transmission of a patients video, medical images, and electrocardiogram signals, which is required throughout the prehospital procedure, is demonstrated over commercially available 3G wireless cellular data service. Moreover, the physician can remotely control the information sent from the patient side. Such a technology will allow a trauma specialist to be virtually present at the remote location and participate in prehospital care, which improves the quality of trauma care and can potentially reduce mortality and morbidity. To alleviate the limited and fluctuant bandwidth barriers of the wireless cellular link, the system adapts to network conditions through media transformations, data prioritization, and application-level congestion control methods. Experimental evaluation of the system prototype over real network conditions, transmitting different media types between the trauma patient and hospital unit, is encouraging. The teletrauma system reported in this paper is the first of its kind and it provides a basis for future enhancements.

WISTA: a wireless telemedicine system for disaster patient care

In this paper, we introduce a low-cost and easy-to-deploy wireless telemedicine system, denoted WISTA, that can assist on-site patient care during disasters. The proposed system facilitates real-time transfer of multimedia data from video cameras, sensors, medical images and text from multiple disaster sites to the control center of the disaster area. WISTA enables disaster managers to obtain patients’ status information in real-time from the entire disaster site, which can assist the timely diagnosis as well as the treatment of patients. Moreover, the disaster managers in the control center can remotely control the information sent from the individual disaster sites. The proposed system uses a hierarchical architecture which allows scalable implementation. For dense disaster areas, a layered structure is applied to support information dissemination from s large number of patients. We have implemented the system prototype over a wireless channel and successfully demonstrated simultaneous transmission of video, sensor information, medical images and text from multiple sites to the control center. In addition, the scalability of the system is evaluated using OPNET simulation. Both experiments validate our system design.

Adaptive MAC Protocol for QoS support in UWB-based Wireless Networks

In this paper we propose an adaptive MAC protocol that provides QoS support for multimedia applications in UWB-based wireless networks. The proposed protocol accounts for the UWB unique characteristics while considering the QoS requirements. The resource allocation algorithm of the proposed protocol assigns the transmission parameters (data rate and power) to nodes in the network based on the current traffic conditions. We present a thorough performance evaluation of the proposed protocol in terms of throughput, admission ratio, energy consumption and delay. The proposed protocol is studied for different system loads and traffic distributions.

A Mobile Teletrauma System for Rural Trauma Care

This paper introduces a cost-effective, portable teletrauma system that assists the health care centers in providing pre-hospital trauma care to rural population. Simultaneous transmission of a patients video, medical images, and ECG signals, which is required throughout the prehospital procedure, is demonstrated over commercially available, low-bandwidth, wireless cellular data service using transmission technologies such as CDMA. Moreover, the physician can remotely control the information sent from the patient side. Such a technology will allow a trauma specialist to be virtually present at the remote location and participate in pre-hospital care, which improves the quality of trauma care and can potentially reduce mortality and morbidity.

A MAC Protocol for QoS Support in MI-UWB based Wireless Network

In this paper we propose a MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol (named MACQUE) that provides QoS support for multimedia applications in the MI- UWB (Multiband Impulse-based Ultra Wideband) based wireless networks. The proposed MAC protocol utilizes the advantages provides by the MI-UWB including multiple non-overlapping frequency channels, simultaneous transmissions in same channel as well as dynamical reconfiguration of transmission parameters. The resource allocation algorithm of the proposed MAC protocol uses a two-phase procedure to provide explicit QoS support and optimize resource utilization in a dense medium-size MI-UWB network. The performance of the proposed MAC protocol is evaluated by extensive simulation study.