December 03 2014 0comment

IoT Telemedicine

Health issues needs treatment. Not everyone can make frequent visits to hospitals – it costs money, consumes time and keeps you away from your work and family.

Telemedicine is an information and communication based system, which can deliver diagnostics and health services electronically  even in the absence of physical full-fledged infrastructure. Simply put, it allows the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another via telecommunication infrastructure to improve, sustain, or assist a patient’s health status.

Telehealth is another term closely associated with Telemedicine, which is often used to encompass a broader definition of a remote health care that does not always involve clinical services. videoconferencing, telepresence, transmission of still images, e-health including patient portals, remote monitoring of vital signs, continuing medical education, and nursing call centers, are all considered part of telemedicine and telehealth.

There can be a real time approach requiring the presence of both the doctor and the patient and video conferencing is one of the most preferred ways for this synchronous approach. There are also peripheral devices which can be attached to computers or the video-conferencing equipment which can aid in an interactive examination. For example, a tele-otoscope allows a remote physician to ‘see’ inside a patient’s ear; a tele-stethoscope allows the consulting remote physician to hear the patient’s heartbeat. Typical scenarios for real time consultation are psychiatry, internal medicine, rehabilitation, cardiology, perdiatrics, neurology, gynecology etc

Another approach is store and forward  which involves acquiring medical data like (images, various bio test results etc) and then transmitting this data to a doctor or medical specialist for convenient offline assessment. In this approach there is no need for both the parties to be present at same time.

Setting up Telemedicine

  • Setting up a communication network is mandatory, this acts as the highway for data transfer. This entails putting together a fixed, mobile and hand-held platform and web technology based broad band wired / wireless wide area network centring on the district hospital acting as hub.
  • Design and development of “Village Tele-ambulance System and rural emergency healthcare services / Trauma care module”
  • Development of technology platform for harvest, compilation, storage (patient data) at regional district hub and central Data Center
  • Development of Rural Health Knowledge Resource through web portal on public health domain

Expected Benefits

  • Timely access to diagnostic, specialty healthcare advice at the grass root level .
  • New geographies for healthcare providers and widening then reach to cover more geographies and remote locations
  • Creation of a model for Rural Emergency / Trauma services on Telemedicine infrastructure
  • Improvement on knowledge base of the rural population (to empower the rural folks on self healthcare – disease prevention & health promotion)
  • Remote education, training / retraining and skill development of grass root healthcare workers and professionals.

Conclusion

Telemedicine is the need of the hour not only for the rural but the urban people as well. Soon this will shape the medicine delivery, when you no longer have to go to your doctor to obtain prescription and then go to a pharmacy to buy the medicines. Instead, you can have the examination, prescription and medicines delivered to you without leaving the comfort of your location. Sounds interesting! Keep watching Avaali mobility and IoT space!