Portable real-time homecare system design with digital camera platform

An ideal homecare system needs to process multiple diagnostic signals using a portable battery-driven device and provide a real-time audio/video interface for telemedicine applications. In this paper, we present a low cost real-time homecare system based on a commercial digital camera platform. In addition to the typical multimedia recording functions of a digital camera, such as JPEG and MPEG-1/MPEG-4 recording, the proposed system can further process and compress phonocardiogram (PCG) signal concurrently.