Practical evaluation of GPRS use in a telemedicine system in Cyprus

The unceasing emergence of new technologies in wireless and mobile telecommunication networks, combined with the simultaneous rapid advances in information technology, are leading to many new solutions in the field of telemedicine, thus offering more opportunities for improving further existing and supporting new advanced services for healthcare. The objective of this paper is to carry out a practical evaluation of the performance of the GSM and GPRS systems in the transmission/reception of X-ray images and video in emergency orthopedics cases. As expected, the performance of GPRS is superior to that of GSM. The data transfer rate achieved with GPRS were in the range of 32 Kbps with the download time for typical X-ray images of a file size of 200 Kbytes to the mobile device to be in the region of 60 seconds. Similar performance was also recorded in the case of a moving station (simulating the ambulance) for the biggest part of the journey. In conclusion, although the medical imaging downloading timing was in the range of a few minutes, the physicians were very pleased by the benefits offered by the system through the freedom of access, anywhere and anytime even in motion.