Telemedicine using mobile telecommunication: Towards syntactic interoperability in teleexpertise

Telemedicine allows collaborative activities between health professionals for the deployment of medical procedures carried out remotely by means of device using information and communication technologies. This article focuses on the Teleexpertise that allows collaboration between medical professionals in order to share knowledge and expert advices used as explanation elements for decision support. We propose a conceptual model integrating the FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) Contract Net Protocol which permits to collect medical professionals' answers for a request for teleexpertise in an efficient manner. Our model satisfies four requirements (coverage, QoS (Quality of Service) guarantees and prioritisation, mobility and roaming, service usability) on the configuration and operation of the underlying network and the services. Therefore, we provide an operational assistance by improvement of the networks quality of service via interoperable web services. Finally, we hope to bring a tangible contribution on the implementation of this suggested conceptualization that will allow to generate relevant and action-oriented findings. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.