Instant messaging communication gateway for medical applications

Internet has changed the way of how people communicate and exchange information. Enduringly, more and more doctors are getting familiar with internet and the offered capabilities. Hospitals are interconnected, making use of internet, forming medical information networks. The doctors exchange information with the help of internet. A very common way of communication is the electronic email even when a doctor looks for a second opinion from another expert doctor. In the market, various medical applications for tele-consultation can be found. Some of them are web based and others are stand alone applications. In this paper we will propose a comminication gateway, based on Jabber instant massaging protocol, for modern and demanding medical applications, focusing on teleconsultations applications. The proposed gateway is able to handle connections restricted by firewalls and makes use of potential available proxies inside of a network. In addition, we will address the problems related to firewalls and proxies and will proposed a new way of communication for medical applications based on Jabber an instant massaging protocol. Furthermore, in order to handle binary data transmission to an offline entity over a Jabber network, we proposed an extension to In-Band Byte streams communication protocol.