Projects abroad  PROPRACTION

PROPRACTION was one of the EU Leonardo da Vinci projects, which was performed from 1999 to 2001. The main and novel component of PROPRACTITION system was a new distributed architecture, comprised by a collaborative toolkit to add audio-conferencing, tele-pointing, window sharing, user's co-ordination and application synchronisation facilities, either to existing or new medical diagnosis applications. In comparison with existing products, mainly based on centralised architectures, our distributed toolkit was specially designed for telemedicine applications: to allow different levels of sharing between participants, to improve user feedback in highly interactive user interfaces, and to optimise the required communication bandwidth in order to implement a telemedicine application on almost any telecommunication network. This system will be applied to build a co-operative medical education application, in which two doctors, located in different hospitals, need to achieve a co-operative diagnosis on cardio-vascular diseases.