Using voice and video for telemedicine
The current COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the potential for telemedicine and telehealth solutions. Virtual visits and new patient management tools are changing the way health care providers improve the delivery of care while improving safety and reducing the exploding costs of traditional methods.
With real time communications APIs available from the AT&T Marketplace, developers of digital healthcare platforms can add secure, reliable, high definition voice, video, and more, to their telemedicine applications, and bring their solutions to life.
Here are some examples of how voice and video enabled telemedicine applications can help improve the patient experience, save money and, potentially, help save lives.
Emergency Medicine
When patients arrive at the ER – or before they even reach the ER – first responders can securely call or video chat immediately, not relying on open applications like Skype or Facetime, but communicating through their own workflow system.
Home Care
Providers can schedule virtual visits and post-operative check-ups, while also being available should a question arise from the patient. All interactions can be initiated and completed, stored and analyzed as part of the process itself.
Chronic Care
For patients with diabetes or heart conditions, virtual disease management applications can now do more than just collect data – applications can embed human voice and video communications making it easier and more intuitive for chronically ill patients to interact quickly with their providers.
Building voice and video into your iOS telemedicine application
You can use our sample reference applications that we built to showcase the capabilities of the AT&T API Marketplace voice & video APIs and SDKs. These provide a useful reference to help you as developers build better communications experiences into your apps by sharing best practices using easy to read code examples.
This application demonstrates voice and video calling using the API Marketplace iOS SDK. It creates two-way voice and video communications between two users, as well as anonymous calls to any PSTN number. This application will help you build a custom video experience for mobile to mobile or mobile to web use cases more easily and quickly.
Features
- Two-way voice video with real-time video and audio
- Enable/disable camera
- Mute/unmute mic
- anonymous call to any PSTN number
You can freely download and deploy the sample app. When using the app in production, voice and video calling usage charges will apply, see the AT&T API Marketplace Pricing page for more details.
Get started
The sample iOS voice and video calling application is available to download today on Github. You can check the project README file for configuration information. The following points are important to note as you use this application:
- Preferably use the master branch to clone the application from Github
- The application was built using the Cocoapods package manager. Go to the application’s directory in the Terminal, and install dependencies with pod install
- This will generate a new xcworkspace file, open this file from now on to use the project:
- You will need to modify LoginViewController.swift with your account clientId, email and password that you created in your account on the AT&T API Marketplace.
Watch this video to follow all the steps needed to deploy the iOS Voice and Video application, or check this CPaaS iOS Audio-Video Calling Sample App post.
If you are new to the AT&T API Marketplace and don’t have an account yet, check out these Getting Started posts and videos here on the Developer Community. They will show you how to sign up on the API Marketplace, manage your Account and Projects, add Users, and access credentials to allow you to use the voice and video APIs.
Quickstarts and API References
You can get details of the voice and video APIs, and others, by checking out all the Quickstarts available on the Developer documentation page on the AT&T API Marketplace. These Quickstarts, together with API Reference docs, can help you build your own apps. In the process, you will learn about the features and capabilities of the voice and video APIs. By using the available code snippets, you can minimize the effort to write code from scratch and save valuable time. You can also examine the code in the sample app for reference as well.
Go to the Developer Community API & SDK page to access other sample apps for messaging, chat and 2FA APIS, and for other mobile and web platforms. You can also check out other innovative use cases for different industry verticals .
We love developers!
We enjoy collaborating with API Marketplace developers to help you build exciting and innovative real time communications experiences. We would love to hear about your project on the Developer Community. Just create a topic, write a short post and tell us about it! We would also love to get your feedback if you encounter any issues, need help, or have suggestions. Or you can Contact us for support on the API Marketplace itself.