My research conducted during these last twelve years focused on three aspects. The first part dealt with image/video compression with a particular interest in medical fields. The goal is to reduce the data volume while ensuring diagnostic quality. The second part involved embedded processor software development and design of dedicated hardware architectures for multimedia applications. Several embedded demonstrators have been achieved for telemedicine applications, a field that has been growing over the years as a key asset for helping persons with chronic illnesses, care for elderly people and supporting public health policies to reduce health care costs. The last research theme introduced a support tool that allows estimating power consumption and autonomy of an embedded system by taking into account the deployed software application, the architecture of the platform and the energy source. With this tool, designers and software developers have the opportunity to make the right decisions to extend device autonomy.