Mobile Imagery eXchange (MIX) toolkit: data sharing for the unconnected.

This paper proposes a healthcare solution that enables the sharing of medical videos in areas without satellite, broadband or mobile internet connectivity. Rural areas often encounter issues such as shortage of electricity, poor telecommunication services and lack of health facilities which have led to a deficiency of medical care in remote areas. The deployment of mobile devices for healthcare services is vital to alleviating these concerns. A majority of mobile device owners are located in developing nations, and the number of users is continually rising. These technologies effectively support remote health care due to their low-power requirements, multiple functionalities and custom applications. The Mobile Imagery eXchange (MIX) toolkit is a software application capable of converting echocardiogram videos into text for transmission through short message service (SMS), over a global system for mobile communications network. A smartphone or computer installed with the MIX toolkit can be utilized to deliver effective medical care within rural regions. To significantly shrink data size, video, image and file processing techniques are applied for analysis, segmentation, compression and conversion. Experiments show that data size reduction rates above 60 until 95 % are achievable when transforming imagery into text. Furthermore, in optimal conditions, the average SMS per image ranges from 9 to 23 text messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]