Universal Access to Health Services Through the Digital Terrestrial Television

Introduction

Western World has almost completed the transition toward the digital television, and in particular toward the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) (García Leiva, 2006). Thanks to the presence of a modem and of a reader of smart cards, some decoders may provide a new access for the masses to the digital Information Society. They can bring simple transactional services through the secure return (telephonic) channel. Quoting from (Ko, 2013):

The DTT software is almost universally based on an open standard called “Multimedia Home Platform” (MHP) (ETSI, 2003). MHP applications are written in Java and are called “Xlets” (see (Morris, 2005) for a complete introduction to Interactive TV Standards). They are broadcast by the TV operators inside the MPEG video stream, so they do not need to be installed on the Set Top Box (STB) and are independent from its operating system, thus being immediately available in every home. On the STB there is an embedded “Application Manager” (which comes with the operating system of the STB) whose task is that of managing the life cycle of the Xlet, which is quite like an applet and has methods to let the Application Manager init, start, pause and kill itself.

The expression “T-Government” means “E-Government over the DTT”, and it defines the set of services provided by Governments or private entities through the DTT (Gunter, 2004). The services include information, requests for personal certificates, payments, utilities (municipal property tax, taxes, fines) and services to participate (eg TV polls on the work of public administrations) (Weerakkody, 2008; King, 2007).

After this epochal change, Local Healthcares should not disregard the return channel of the DTT as a platform to distribute their services (as they are currently doing through the Web). This because elderly people, which are not comfortable with personal computers and the Internet, are instead used to the TV and its handset; the idea should be simply that of bringing all the important informative and interactive services over a suite of Xlets.

The potential of DTT to support personal health care and wellness of individuals, namely elderly people, has recently been investigated by some european projects as the portuguese “iDTV HEALTH” (Baptista, 2013) and the spanish “T-Asisto” (briefly described in the book, Martinho (2013)). These first results suggest that DTT may represent a real contribution to bring healthcare and wellness to the target population, namely as a supplement to health services provision.

The local television stations are clearly the partners that should work with local health authorities to bring health services to the citizens through the DTT. As japaneese researchers noticed (Koga-Browes, 2012):

We believe that this change could help local broadcasters to survive the digital television tsunami and avoid what happened, for instance, in Vietnam, where the number of players is reduced from 67 to 3 national DTT broadcasters and 5 regional DTT stations (Tran, 2011).

A main problem with this project is that of ensuring the usability of such Xlets. To anticipate the importance of this problem, as a negative example we remember that in 2005 we took almost six months to realize that developing an Xlet to browse the Web over the return line of the DTT would be quite a nonsense, since it is almost impossible to navigate the Internet through a very limited input device as the remote control (instead of the powerful PCs’ couple keyboard/mouse or smartphones’ capacitive touchscreen) and with a low resolution monitor as the TV screen (but other researchers tried to develop a browser for the DTT, see (Amerini, 2010)).