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Because most research and development for homecare services have focused on providing connections between home and service centers, the goal of the present work is to develop techniques and create realtime communications to connect service centers and homecare workers in mobile environments. A key technical issue for this research is how to overcome the limitation of bandwidth in mobile media and networks. An effort has been made to balance performance of communication and basic demands in telehealth through optimized system design and technical implementation. Implementations using third generation (3G) Freedom Of Mobile multimedia Access (FOMA) and Personal Handyphone System (PHS) were developed and evaluated. We conclude that the system we developed based on 3G FOMA provides sufficient and satisfactory functions for use in homecare services.

Telemedicine with mobile communications is a new research area aimed at providing highly flexible medical services that are not possible with standard telephony. In this article, a teleconference system via mobile Internet connections for homecare service is presented. An important purpose of this system is the realization of real time communication between the service station (experts) and the service providers (nurses) in mobile conditions. The following functions are realized via mobile internet connections: 1) a communication control platform for data transmission and process management; 2) whiteboard function to share image and draw free lines; 3) voice transmission between service station and service providers; 4) system management including data maintenance and database access. In this system, still images and voice data are transmitted in real time between service providers (patient's home site) and service managers (station site). This study is a new trial to support homecare service with mobile telecommunication technology.