Delay Reduced Multimedia Transmission in Medical Emergencies

With the growing population across the world, medical emergencies are also increasing. During such emergencies, we often need to transport the patient to a distant hospital for specialty medical attention. While the patient is in transit in an ambulance, the transmission of medical images such as X-ray, ultrasonography (USG) etc. becomes important in order that the doctor at the remote hospital may understand the patient's condition and assist in pre-hospitalization care. In the digital world, the size of multimedia content is an important factor considering their storage and transmission during emergency situations. Compression is one of the fundamental techniques to address this problem. In this paper, we attempt to transmit medical images with the help of an Android application we developed for the purpose. To reduce the end-to-end delay, the images are first compressed using a modification of quantization table. An increase in the compression ratio is thus achieved which further assists in reducing the delay more than 80%. The inclusion of Google's Firebase server in the system smoothens the process of data reception and retrieval on the doctor's side at a distant hospital. Timely reception of the data ensures an efficient pre-hospitalization care for the patient.