Are Single-Board Computers an Option for a Low-Cost Multimodal Telemedicine Platform?: First Tests in the Context of Santa Catarina State Integrated Telemedicine and Telehealth System

摘要

Telemedicine and Telehealth are disciplines dedicated to provide health care and health care education when distance is an issue. Nowadays, Telemedicine and Telehealth Stations (TTSs) are used to provide physicians and educators with tools that concentrate and integrate different technologies, contributing to organize and simplify their workload. To support scenarios involving features related to teleconsultation and tele-education, TTSs must consider the adoption of hardware platforms robust enough to reach minimal requirements while providing service deliverability and continuity. Despite being usually built for execution on desktops and laptops, it is possible that TTSs be reorganized to use Single-Board Computers (SBCs) as a most portable-and cost-effective solution. Aiming to evaluate such possibility, this work presents a performance study of four of the most popular SBCs available on the market, focusing the execution of web conferences in the context of the Santa Catarina State Integrated Telemedicine and Telehealth System (STT/SC), in Brazil. Using descriptive statistics, we concluded that the Raspberry Pi 2 SBC is the best option to be adopted, considering its results regarding CPU consumption, memory utilization, and video delay.