CONCERTO · Content and cOntext aware delivery for iNteraCtive \nmultimEdia healthcaRe applicaTiOns

During the last century, significant scientific progress has more than doubled the average lifetime of developed countries inhabitants. This amazing result is the indirect consequence of X-rays discoveryin 1901, of antibiotics in the late 20s, of advances in surgery with the first heart transplant in the late 60s, to name just a few representative examples. In the new millennium, eHealth will likely constitute the next disruptive big jump: this goal will be fostered by the networking technology that CONCERTO envisions to develop, which addresses the delivery of interactive multimedia applications over wirelessnetworks. In this fast-paced world, early diagnosis (i.e., before even the patient reaches an hospital) and remote care (i.e., without physical presence of medical doctors) are important cornerstones to make this big jump become a reality.At a technical level, this interactive and real-time multimedia adaptation and delivery, is extremely challenging due to the necessity of flawless 3D/4D images and video quality, which is for doctors andparamedics a hard constraint to yield correct diagnosis.CONCERTO intends to design and validate radically new techniques for media content fusion, adaptation, delivery and interactive access. Advanced algorithms and codecs to improve the compression and the protection of medical images and videos will be developed. Near-instantaneous adaptation will be then used for coping with variable bandwidth availability, error-prone links, etc., that may affect the received quality. More particularly, the project will design adaptive solutions considering not only the network capabilities but also the specific context of the delivery, such as patient-specific data and status. Finally, media-caching aided content-aware wireless delivery (e.g., LTE / LTE Advanced) schemes will be designed for advanced content-aware networking. In this challenge, each partner will play the right instrument to ensure the validity of the CONCERTO solution: this will tackle from low-level technical aspects, to the realization of a proof-of-concept demonstrator and to the achievement of high level objectives, where physicians of the hospital of Perugia will assess the actual quality of experience, orchestrating and exploiting the consortium skills at best.