Live video medicine is a hard real-time application where a missed bit can be crucial and 99.9% performance insufficient. Soft real-time applications, like video conferencing and video chats, operate on a best effort basis where a missed bit is insignificant. The real issue is that most live video medicine solutions on the market today are soft real-time applications, born to carry out virtual board room meetings or video chats with your grandma, with minimal adjustment for the “healthcare vertical”–as if the general populace’s and physicians’ needs were not fundamentally different. As a telemedicine director recently told us, most live video medicine solutions “stop working the moment we leave our hospital’s driveway.”
swyMed is the first purpose-built video medicine application that recognizes the fundamental challenges of hard real-time applications. Our goal is to deliver audio, video and data with minimum delay, maximum quality and security, and extreme reliability. swyMed achieves this goal by:
• encoding, transporting and decoding audio, video and images in less than 150 milliseconds at 128 kbps, below the ITU threshold for good quality audio interactions, thus leaving a 250 millisecond buffer for network delay before reaching the ITU maximum of 400 millisecond;
• delivering, fast, 99% of packets it sends at such a low speed;
• accepting loss of signal of up to 120 seconds without interrupting the session on the other side, and automatically reconnecting the endpoint as soon as signal is recovered; and
• encrypting all communications using a session-specific AES 256 bit key without storing any PHI on our software clients or servers.
No other solution on the market today is capable of achieving such a performance, making swyMed the logical choice for hard real-time data transmission in healthcare. The ability to work reliably at low bandwidth is important not only for rural areas or emergency situations, but is crucial for medicine in general.
