Why Does Healthcare Industry Need Flash Applications?

By Author: Ruth Jackson
Total Articles: 51
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At Mindfire we have been developing applications for the healthcare industry for quite some time now. So over the years we have developed a good understanding of the industry as a whole plus knowledge on use of Flash technologies to address problems/ find solutions to problems faced by our clients who work in the healthcare domain.

Recently we developed a video conferencing widget for a client who is into health services and provides Telemedicine services. Please find below a short write up on that project – it has two parts to it, first part contains the description of the client need and second part has the description of the solution provided by Flash application development experts at Mindfire.

Client Need – What the client wanted to accomplish?
The client wanted to build an application which would enable the patient to set up video conferencing appointments with doctors. Client wanted the application to be such that the user can send an invite for the ...
... video conference to others as well and all those who accept the invite can then meet up and chat in a group video conference setup. This way the location constraint is removed. Client wanted to optimize application performance and consider reducing network bandwidth usage and we implemented peer connectivity with several load time optimizations to achieve this.

The application developed by Mindfire
We designed and implemented a web based video conferencing widget to be used as an extension to a health care application. The web application implements a link that allows users to schedule a meeting in advance and send an email with the invitation link to the patient/group of attendees. The attendees can then click on the link and join the conference. The widget allows for recording the conference sessions and presents users with the ability to group chat as well as see each other and talk on an audio video interface. At the end of the conference session the users can download their copy of the text chat and recorded video. Among features we implemented standard controls for video/ audio including controls to mute/pause video stream and control the microphone and speaker’s volume. We also implemented the option to ping users to get their attention which causes the widget on attendee’s machines to ring. In consideration of bandwidth we also implemented Peer 2 Peer connections on demand when recording of conference was not needed. Flash Media Server was used as the back end server and implemented meeting requests synchronization and authentication for user widgets.

The technologies that we used for developing this application are Flex 4.5, Actionscript 3.0, FMS 4, PHP, JavaScript, XML, MySql, SVN.

This application exactly catered to what the customer needed and was very satisfied with the final outcome. In addition to this the Flash team at Mindfire has done a lot of other useful/good projects in Flash, you can click here to have a look at those.