Basic information
Title: Igniting new possibilities for Future Media Internet based medical education
Acronym: medFLAME
Company: medVC.eu sp. z o.o.
Trial/Replicator: Trial
Type: SME
Where: Barcelona
When (time-plan): January to June 2020 (6 months)
Project summary
medVC is a telepresence platform designed to be deployed in hospitals to enable real-time audio-video communication and remote collaboration between doctors. medVC consists of hardware end-points and extended cloud services. We focus on achieving the highest possible quality of medical picture and sending multiple video streams coming from cameras, microscopes, endoscopes, surgical robots, etc. medVC complements its real-time collaboration functionality with the Interactive Medical University (https://edu.medvc.eu), which is a platform for improving the qualifications of doctors and medical students in various medical specialties. The platform provides high-quality live video streaming directly from operating theatres. Each session is recorded and published on the IMU portal to build an educational repository of surgical recordings.
Our current solutions for live streaming and VoD (video on demand) delivery, although they do serve their needs, are slowly becoming outdated and the transcoding, orchestration and node processing functionalities offered by the FLAME platform could enhance the end-user experience. The introduction of 5G edge processing could help us build a better service, allowing for controlled and localized media production, delivery and consumption. The possible substitution of the current CDN (content delivery network) solution with localized deployments including the FLAME functionality could reduce our costs of installation and operation. In our experiment, we will use the facilities in Barcelona, as we are already collaborating with 2 hospitals in the city. For our trial, we will ask one of those hospitals to record VoD materials from surgeries, and possibly conduct live surgical sessions, to keep the experimentation as close to reality as possible. Also, as both hospitals have medical students, we will ask them to provide a group of volunteers for the trials. They will conduct QoE (quality of experience) validation on site in Barcelona and answer a prepared poll, to measure the planned KPIs (key performance indicators).
Besides confirming that our system can be adapted to take advantage of the FLAME platform, we would like to validate the improvements of such an arrangement listed below.
End-user benefits
- Reduction in start-up time for playout
- Shorter reaction time to latency changes
- Improved quality of experience and reduced usage of network resources obtained via multicast delivery
- Reachability of content from anywhere in the network
- Deployment of the content based on predicted demand
Operator benefits
- Network cost reduction due to reduced network usage
- Service cost reduction due to reduced server usage
- No content preloading required as caches are dynamically updated depending on demand
- Distribute compute resources more equally across available edge compute clusters