An Interactive Cooperative Teleworking Environment

In this paper we present the design and the implementation of an interactive environment for cooperative teleworking. Telemathea ooers tools that support the communication and the teleworking between tutor and trainee, who may reside in remote geographical regions. This environment ooers audio communication over the network as well as support for joint editing of text documents and still images. It supports diierent audio coding techniques so as to adjust to the available bandwidth, and makes use of the RTP protocol in order to facilitate the exchange of audio and, in the future, video packets. 1 Introduction Multimedia telematics applications for communication and cooperative teleworking give the opportunity for creative joint-work independently of geographical locations. Applications of this kind provide tutors and trainees with the ability of continual, close and eecient cooperation without any need for transportation and personal meetings. Furthermore, the environments for Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) may give the opportunity for virtual meetings, conferences and presentations without the limitation of physical presence ((2]). Initially a few applications for Remote Expert Consultation were developed that attempted to provide experts with the ability of limited cooperation. An approach to Remote Expert Consultation was RECPhone ((3]) which was implemented as a part of the European project TELEMED/RACE. The aim of RECPhone was to fullll the remote doctors' needs for communication and cooperative telediagnosis. RECPhone provides its users with capabilities of transferring les and medical images and interchanging text messages and cursor coordinates in order to attend virtual medical meetings for telediagnosis. * T""""""" (telemathea) is the Greek word which best describes cooperative teletraining.