Oliver Hohlfeld

Bachelor Thesis

Development of a instant messaging-based communication module for telemedical applications

Abstract

In sparsely populated or conflict areas medical care can be improved by the use of telemedicine. In uncertain cases the attending physician can take medical pictures like a radiogram and immediately send them to another expert. In this case a long journey for the patient can be avoided.

Such a telemedical project of the Fraunhofer IGD is the TeleInViVo system. The communication layer uses a TCP peer-to-peer connection which is encountering more and more problems with firewall systems. In addition, the addressing of physicians by IP-addresses proved to be circuitous in practice. They are difficult to remember and provide insufficient mobility because they can change frequently. This bachelor thesis researched an instant messaging based communication layer for the TeleInViVo system.

Essential purposes of this thesis are to bypass firewall barriers and to solve the problems caused by troublesome IP-addresses. As an instant messaging system the Jabber/XMPP protocol is used. Moreover, the addressing is now done using static Jabber addresses which are easier to handle for physicians. The transmission of sensitive patient records is secured by the SSL/TLS protocol at the communication layer. Firewall barriers are avoided by the use of central instant messaging servers and proxy technologies. Furthermore, the Jabber enhancement protocol HTTP-Polling enables access to Jabber servers by using simple HTTP connections.

The main focus of this thesis is the selection, validation and specification of Jabber/XMPP protocols for the exchange of medical data. In this connection, medical data can be pictures, like ultrasounds or laboratory values such as blood values, and mouse actions, like mouse movements or mouse clicks. For data-transfer an existing protocol has been adapted and extended. Moreover, a new protocol for the exchange of mouse actions has been specified. In conclusion, some of the presented methods are implemented, tested. The results of the implementation are discussed.