CoMed: a real-time collaborative medicine system

Abstract

CoMed is a World Wide Web-based real-time collaborative medical system that allows medical specialists to share patient records and to communicate with each other on the Internet. CoMed consists of a multimedia object database containing relevant information about laryngeal diseases and a real-time multimedia collaboration system. The latter includes a teleconferencing system, a whiteboard and chatting system, and a multi-agent system for conference calling. We adopted the object database O/sub 2/ and CORBA technologies for the multimedia database. This provides the flexibility, extensibility and location transparency of the databases. We implemented SeeYou ActiveX control for the teleconferencing and a Java applet for the whiteboard and chatting system, as well as a session manager which integrates these two systems that are based on different technologies. Moreover, our multi-agent system for conference calling makes our system more advantageous by allowing the convener to minimize the effort needed to call a conference.