Development of Real-time Homecare Aid System

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Recently elderly people with a life-style related disease, such as high-blood pressure disease, cardiac disease, diabetes mellitus and others, are increasing. Therapeutic effect is expected to increase if they live freely and comfortably at home. Many hospitals have introduced the Local Area Network (LAN) system and the Internet to promote IT infrastructure in Japan so that Telemedicine is practiced to realize medical care and health supporting practices based on patient information derived from images transmitted from remote site in many ways. The challenges and conditions must be considered. But use of the Internet causes many problems, such as interception, falsification and others. In this study, I developed a system, which guarantees the copyright and concealment of medical information of patients by using Watermark technique and VPN (Virtual Private Network) technique.Patient System, Infirmary System, and Center-hospital System compose our developed system. A patient can transmit … More healthcare information, such as body temperature, pulse and others every day to Infirmary by using the Patient System. His/Her family doctor, who referred to those information can give advise by the Infirmary System. Therefore, health care to patients at home is possible. Both of the Patient System and the Infirmary System are equipped with NTSC video camera so that the camera of the Patient System can be controlled from the Infirmary System. Therefore, the patient can be examined by his/her doctor even while staying home.Medical images of the patient are generated by some medical modality, such as CT (Computed Tomography), and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). The copyright of the images can be guaranteed by using Watermark technique when they are stored. The concealment of them can be guaranteed by VPN technology, which can highly encrypt the images when they are transmitted from the infirmary to the center hospital.Therefore, cooperation among the patient's home, the infirmary, and the center hospital can be maintained while preserving the copyright and concealment of the medical information of the patient. The system needs neither expensive equipment nor expenses for introduction and management because only personal computers are utilized and all the application is Web-based system. Less