Satellite telemedicine station

The satellite telemedicine van is an application developed through the innovative telemedicine network and used by the Italian Field Hospital involved in the peacekeeping mission in Sarajevo in 1996 and 1997. This enabled the mission to support the health care structure of the University Clinical Centre of Sarajevo and the IDI hospital in Tirana.

The telemedicine satellite network combines videoconferencing with real-time data exchange between multimedia computers and medical peripherals of medical images such as X-rays, scans, pictures of pathology samples, etc. The links between the hospitals are supported by up to four digital carriers of 384 kb using capacity leased by ESA on the Eutelsat II-F4 satellite.

This project was the result of cooperation between ESA, which provided the communication infrastructure; the Italian space agency ASI, which funded the pilot projects through ESA's ARTES programme; the Italian Ministry of Defence, which had the operational responsibility for the system; and TelBios, a consortium between the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan and Alenia Aerospazio, Rome, which proposed and coordinated the project.