Development of platform-independent web-based telecardiology application for pilot case study

Telecardiology is one of the branches from telemedicine that transmits cardiac data such as electrocardiogram (ECG) and medical records from the patient site to cardiologist for the purpose of diagnosis by using telecommunication and information technologies. Most of the current commercialized telecardiology applications are cost expensive, vendor-specific, and dependent on computing platform and operating system (OS). There are plenty of research have been done on web-based telecardiology application either in real-time transmission or store-and-forward. In this paper, a platform-independent and OS-independent web-based telecardiology application, named VirtualDave System, is developed. The proposed system allow users to log on and access from any computer or mobile communication devices such as smart phone as long as they have internet access and web browser. The developed application allows users in categories of patient, administrator, medical officer and cardiologist, to communicate and get medical consultation without long distance traveling. With the improvement to the system dependency and functionality enhancement such as instant messaging, this web-based telecardiology could significantly help to improve the health care services especially in rural area.