POA_S@UDE A New Collaborative Tele-ultrasonography System over PLC

Access to medical care is sometimes difficult to be reached by citizens living in distant and underserved areas. The problem increases on high complexity medical cases that are not preventively identified. The recent advance of broadband communication, like Power Line (PLC), combined with state-of-the-art multimedia compression methods allowed reaching isolated areas that lacks of intra/internet connections. This paper presents the results of the POA_S@UDE Project, a research that aimed the improvement of patient quality of life in distant urban communities from high-complexity hospitals, focusing on obstetric ultrasonography (U/S) examinations during prenatal period. Statistics show an obstetric examination miss rate higher 60% at the Restinga peripheral district (100,000 inhabitants) in Brazil. The main reason is the time and financial difficulties to go to central hospitals to perform regular examinations; added with the time gap of 4 months between an exam request and its realization by the referral hospital. Based on that, we introduce a collaborative tele-U/S system over a PLC hybrid network based on multimedia data. The specialist doctor assists, guides, and interacts in real-time with the remote doctor who operates the U/S equipment. At Restinga, during a pilot of 3 months, the examination waiting time was decreased to I month and the miss rate of prenatal examinations to 30%.