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  • CubeSats for medical data transmission between remote areas and Europe to quick disease diagnoses

    Paper number

    IAC-12,B5,2,11,x15308

    Author

    Mr. Riccardo Lombardi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

    Coauthor

    Mr. Filippo Lopes, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

    Coauthor

    Prof. Amalia Ercoli Finzi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

    Coauthor

    Prof. Michèle Lavagna, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

    Year

    2012

    Abstract
    In the last years Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) have actively provided health care and medical training to populations in war-torn regions and developing countries. As they mostly rely on local medical professionals, many sites are affected by a shortage in medical specialists, and in particular oncologists. Therefore the adopted standard procedure consists in performing in-situ preliminary analysis and sending the gathered data to a remote specialist that formulates the diagnosis and establishes the therapy. However, the logistic chain of the hand-carried data represents a significant problem. When the local hospitals are located in dangerous or difficult-access areas the time between the medical screening and the specialist response can be long and hardly predictable.
    The exploitation of a company providing satellite data transmissions could be a possible solution, but has a greater drawback. Medical imagery systems result in large amount of data that causes the process to be over-budget for most of the organizations.
    A possible, here proposed, solution may be to take advantage of CubeSats as data-relay element. This class of low budget micro-satellites is being successfully selected to answer typically educational goals by institutions and associations with limited  space engineering experience and funding strong limitations.
    The paper presents the results of a feasibility study focused on the exploitation of the Cube-Sats to store and transmit medical data from remote regions of the Austral Earth hemisphere to European locations.
    To minimize costs, two main assumptions have been done: only commercial off-the-shelf components can be selected int the subsystems design and realization, and the operational orbit is not specifically tailored for the mission goals but comes as a constraint from the adoption of a piggy-back launch strategy. 
    This solution, of course, limits the overall costs with respect to the support of a commercial company while improving readiness in data deliver, compared to conventional systems with limited performance decay.
    Feasibility of such a mission is discussed, and possible preliminary sizing is showed in details.
    Abstract document

    IAC-12,B5,2,11,x15308.brief.pdf

    Manuscript document

    IAC-12,B5,2,11,x15308.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).

    To get the manuscript, please contact IAF Secretariat.