Development of Long-Range and High-Speed Wireless LAN for the Transmission of Telemedicine from Disaster Areas

A computer network is indispensable for realizing the use of telemedicine. Recently, experiments to provide telemedicine to residents in remote places over a broadband Internet access have been reported. However, if a disaster were to occur with devastation over a wide mountainous area, and telephones and Internet access were to become unavailable, the provision of telemedicine for injured residents in this area becomes difficult. To solve this problem, we have developed 2.4 GHz wireless LAN units with the longest coverage in Japan to date, of 30 km plus at 54 Mbps which complies with the IEEE802.11 g standard and the Japanese radio regulations to re-establish communications temporally between disaster devastated areas and hospitals, and so on. We tested them in the disaster prevention drill with the regional fire bureau and concluded that wireless LAN units we developed can transfer high-quality video images and sound good enough for use in telemedicine.