Home telecare system using cable television plants - an experimental field trial

To solve the inconvenience of routine transportation of chronically ill and handicapped patients, this paper proposes a platform based on a hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) network in Taiwan, designed to make a home telecare system feasible. The aim of this home telecare system is to combine biomedical data, including three-channel electrocardiogram (ECG) and blood pressure (BP), video and audio, into a National Television Standard Committee (NTSC) channel for communication between the patient and the healthcare provider. Digitized biomedical data and output from medical devices can be further modulated to a second audio program (SAP) subchannel which can be used for second-language audio in NTSC television signals. For long-distance transmission, we translate the digital biomedical data into the frequency domain using frequency shift key (FSK) technology and insert this signal into an SAP band. The whole system has been implemented and tested. The results obtained using this system clearly demonstrated that real-time video, audio, and biomedical data transmission are very clear, with a carrier-to-noise ratio of up to 43 dB.