Mobile Based Telederma tology System
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Date
2011-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Skin diseases currently pose a threat on the general population in the global arena. Both in
developing and developed countries, controlling the prevalence of skin problems is a current
public health challenge. Teledermatology studies the use of information communication
technologies to deliver dermatology care from a remote distance. This project designs and
implements a secure, efficient and reliable mobile based teledermatology system for situations
where the mobile phone’s internet connection is slow and intermittent.
In order to achieve efficient data transmission over limited-bandwidth connections the system
keeps the data transmitted over the network to a minimum. The application requests and
responses were formatted as binary messages. And in situations where the connection fails in the
middle of sending an image only the unsent part of the image is transmitted to the server when
connection is reestablished. Thereby, achieving in efficient bandwidth usage. Security while
transmitting data is achieved by using secure Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) connections.
The project addresses intermittent connectivity, by making use of the mobile device’s storage to
store the data temporarily. When a connection is reestablished the data is automatically sent to
the server.
The system was tested for connection failures by programmatically closing the connection in the
middle of data transmission at random points. An emulator was used to simulate the mobile
application. The system successfully recovered from all the failures.
This project demonstrated the use of mobile applications to deliver teledermatology services in
situations where the network is slow and unreliable.
Description
Keywords
Teledermatology; System