Arto

I agree that we should be seeing more solutions along this line but I think the problem here is that many developers and academics researching this area are more used to Windows and are still put off by the Symbian learning curve. I know in the area of location based games, which forms part of my research, there is a tendency to use windows PDA and WIFI solutions which are often an inferior solution and there are too few of us actually working with ‘true’ mobile devices. Hopefully as more students are exposed to Symbian we will see rise in the use base and more projects will harness the potential. I have seen medical telemetry systems for mountain rescue services in the UK that use Tetra based solutions which may be more attractive for those types of service.

Paul,

That's true that there seems to be some strange rumour going on that Symbian is hard platform to master. I think that it is just an easy excuse not to look for the real reason (what ever it might be). Perhaps more realistic reason could that there has not been suitable Symbian devices available for this kind of solutions. Before Symbian was founded there were many interesting PDA devices from PSION that used the same OS core. When Psion left Symbian device manufacturing the only suitable device available for long time were Nokia 9210. Also until Series60 2nd FP3 scalable UI devices, Series60 devices with small screen have not been so interesting for health care professionals, even though devices have enough capabilities to use.

Hello,

I have wondered about the same issue.
I work as a 'standard' symbian / S60 developer, but I also study Medical Engineering in University and at the moment I am writing a paper of the possibilities of telemedicine in Finland.

I have mostly found information about things such as videoconferencing when i try to search about telemedicine etc. It seems that even though possibilities seem endless not very many applications on this field have been done. Is it just not so profitable then? I wonder if Nokia has anything going on?

It's really not so surprising that third parties have not made so many applications regarding telemedicine since not very many developers have got any information on the medical industry. And on the other hand not many medical industry workers have much time to 'waste' on learning symbian even if they could manage c++ ...

- Pekka Turunen

Hello Pekka,

It's nice to notice that there is activity in the Universities to study this kind of approaches. That is true that medical industry is whole new world and telemedicine is very vast concept. One of the most used is perhaps the videoconferencing you are referring to. In many telemedicine cases, there is a lot data transfer involved and that had usually required fast “landline” connections. I believe that’s one reason that mobile devices have not been used very widely in this area is the network speed. Until now, before 2.5G and 3G networks, the network speed has been one bottleneck for mobile telemedicine solutions.

As an example, just think of teleradiology, where radiological images are transferred. Images such as CT and MR are normally 512 x 512 pixels with 12bit greyscale dynamics. Basically you need two bytes (16 bits) for each pixel, so one raw image takes about 512*512*2 = 524288 bytes. And one CT or MR study can contain images (slices) even over 100. Even if only 30 images are transferred, you need to transfer 30*524288 = 15728640 bytes of data. Of course you can use some special compression algorithm to reduce actual payload but since you should not use lossless compression with medical images, the payload stays quite high. With mobile devices the image decompression should not take too much processor load or you might end up with useless application.

I participated to one EU funded teleradiology project in 1998-2000 (www.biomed.ntua.gr/momeda). In that project I built first ever made DICOM compatible medical image viewer for the Symbian predecessor, Psion EPOC ER 5. But since then there weren’t any integrated EPOC devices with GSM communication we changed the target device to Nokia Communicator (back then running with GeOS). With Communicator we were restricted to use GSM-Data with 9600bps and when operators started to support GSM HighSpeed 14400bps. You can imagine that it took quite a lot of time to transfer even one image. To overcome this, I evaluated some wavelet based lossless compression algorithms as well as jpeg 12bit greyscale compression. Anyway, the built system functioned very well considering the used device and network and their capabilities. The system supported automated image transmission from the hospital using GSM network to the radiologist on-call communicator.

With that I just wanted to present that there are some (not so many though) professional medical applications for the mobile devices available but they are not listed normal Forum Nokia application catalogs.

You might want to look at few pointers that I have been presenting lately here and there. These involve the use of modern Symbian devices.

Presentation at the Med-e-Tel 2006:
www.medetel.lu/download/2006/parallel_sessions/ presentation/0405/Holopainen.pdf

Article in Med-e-Tel 2006 proceedings:
www.ehit.fi/resources/userfiles/File/Med-e-Tel_2006_Arto_Holopainen_Proceeding.pdf