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T4MOD project aims at defining, developing, realising, qualifying and validating a user friendly Telemedicine system, through an interoperable IP overlay satellite network associated to an intelligent end-to-end communication platform, capable to support different medical specialities. This solution, to be validated in a military environment, could be also extended for future exploitations in civilian field for organisations (for example national health systems) operating in underserved and/or geographically isolated areas (such as in case of natural disasters or humanitarian crises) and to develop new medical protocols for a cooperative medical work of diagnosis and therapies. T4MOD involves as users the health Department of four Ministries of Defence: France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
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Developing a system capable to fulfil different needs in terms of applications and services for the provision of healthcare in the frame of military peace keeping missions, with the possibility of evolving towards civilian utilisation (for disaster relief and humanitarian missions);
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Leveraging collaboration among public institutions within their national contexts and among the four representative member states;
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Enabling the medical experts on the reference site to assist the remote site in case of a medical emergency or during a planned consult;
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Provide, an easy to use solution able to be operated by medical and non-medical (but trained) personnel;
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Procuring technical elements (satellite capacity, IT elements, critical breakthrough medical technology, etc.) to implement the designed system;
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Ensuring inter-operability (with other systems used by the same Medical Service) and intra-operability (among different Medical Services of the four MoDs) via the overlay provided by the T4MOD system;
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Providing an intelligent and cost effective solution requiring minimal training, installation, maintenance and running costs;
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Developing and enabling an optimised shared approach for the satellite capacity to minimise the communications costs;
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Providing a comprehensive framework for evaluating the applications and the project overall outcomes.
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Deploying the system both in peaceful and mission environments, performing field trials to validate the capabilities and usefulness of the system.
The system is addressed to end users belonging to Military Health Services of France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The hospitals involved in the pilot will be in Europe and in some remote areas of operations.
The main need refers to Medical Services deployed for peace keeping and humanitarian missions in geographically isolated and underserved areas, with the most difficult environmental and operational conditions due to the lack of local medical specialists. The T4MOD project will use two space assets (i.e. satellite communications and use of a technology initially developed for manned spaceflights: robotised tele-echography).
T4MOD aims at offering an innovative architectural solution in terms of a system and associated operational Telemedicine services; strong points will be the provision of broadband communications over very wide coverage in mesh topology, the ability to manage dynamic on demand access using a simple and user friendly interface for the end users and the ability to handle different resources booking according to the four reference Medical Services needs. The proposed solution presents some characteristics:
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A satellite capacity will be shared between the users and made available via a suitable scheduling or on priority basis.
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A distributed architecture, so avoiding the risk of a centralized single point of failure;
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A distribute deployment: Hospitals have to create an ad-hoc structure in terms of logistics, inventory stocks, skilled personnel devoted to maintenance, help desk and management of satellite infrastructure distributed on single sites;
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An on-demand solution, based on assignment of satellite resources according to the needs, consequent to the non–continuous nature of the T4MOD service;
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The T4MOD Network Control Centre (TCC), main core of system and located at the Fucino Space Centre (FSC, Central Italy).
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Security: authentication and confidentiality thanks to the security framework implemented at the MoD sites.
In the following figure it is depicted the high level T4MOD architecture.
Expected Main Benefits:
The implementation of telemedicine services on large scale is inherently affected by a number of barriers that the T4MOD project tries to overcome with the support of institutional entities such as MoDs, National Space Agencies and ESA.
This common effort should mitigate the hurdles of barriers, helping the project to develop an effective solution and address all the necessary issues with adequate answers.
The T4MoD project is expected to deliver costs reduction due to the utilisation of medical information for better decision (e.g. avoiding non necessary medical evacuations), cooperative use of shared technical resources, decrease of medication errors, improved labour productivity and additional health care.
The Project, started in early November 2011, envisages these milestones:
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Baseline Design Review, May 2012;
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Critical Design Review, September 2012
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Demo Qualification Review, December 2012
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System Deployment Acceptance, June 2013
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Final Review, December 2013.
In this project a number of critical elements will be addressed. The most important of them are those concerning the characterisation of medical services in a military environment, those related to interoperability issues (analysing the technical aspect and implementing a common application layer) and finally those involving the security considerations (aiming at dealing with the aspects of IP acceleration, compression and security that will guarantee the compliance of the architectural proposed solution with the security norms and regulations that are applicable for telemedicine service).
The following telemedicine services will be the primary focus of the project:
- Radiology
- Microbiology
- Cardiology
- Dermatology
- Trauma surgery
- Neurosurgery
- Intensive care
- Emergency medicine (casualty care and management)
A high layer application will be developed with the purpose of managing the services within and inter- and ita-operable environment. This layer will simplify the system operations and integrate elements that could simplify the standard medical workflow while keeping the compliance with the working procedure of the end users; finally it will help to extract, in the friendliest and automatic way, those parameters that could contribute to measure the clinical performance gain. These important advantages will be enhanced by means of an efficient satellite architecture.
T4MOD relies on two main assets coming form space technologies: one side satellite communications, and on the other side a robotized tele-echography solution initially developed to support crews onboard the International Space Station.
Project activities concerning the assessment of User Needs and Requirements started in early November 2011 involving mainly the analysis of the requirements set by the MoD of France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The outcome, a baseline of T4MOD User Requirements, shall be the basis for the System and Service Requirements. In conjunction with this, secure communications’ topics are being analysed.
