Introduction to telemedicine

Introduction to telemedicine#

Meaning#

Telemedicine

General term for providing medical and health-related services remotely using telecommunications

Exercise 9

What is the difference between medicine and healthcare?

Different definitions of telemedicine

  • teleconsulting between clinicians and patients

  • telediagnosis between physicians and clinicians

  • telemonitoring between nurses and patients

  • telesurgery between surgeons and patients

one thing in common: remote information exchange

Information Technology in Telemedicine#

Information technology (IT)

A set of related fields that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages, data and information processing, and storage. Source.

Information and communication technology

is an extensional term for information technology (IT) that stresses the role of unified communications. Source.

  • the marriage of computing systems and unification of many communication technologies (ICT), e.g., through internet enabled a wide range of applications

Exercise 10

How are ICT (information and communication technology) and telemedicine related to each other?

Exercise 11

Give three concrete problems where telemedicine can support in solving?

Exercise 12

Tele means distant. Name three concepts that use the word tele.

  • telecommunication in telemedicine

  • services made possible by IT are vast

    • e.g., drug prescription, spread of pandemic modeling, patient monitoring, etc

  • we will focus on wireless communication

When is a technical solution helpful & feasible?#

Exercise 13

Your grandparents live alone in a village with no doctors. The municipality decided to provide consulting over the internet. Do you see any problems and do you have solutions?

  • problem: children and older people may not be comfortable about technical solutions

  • population aging: more care and monitoring needed

    • case for wireless monitoring

  • example requirements for acceptance:

    • user-friendliness, e.g.,

      • plug-and-play or

      • fully automatic after deployment

    • comfortably worn

    • acceptable if a technician is needed for installation and unavoidable maintenance

Case-study: Ergonomic school bags#

Exercise 14

A municipality got significant amount of complaints from the parents. Allegedly, the school bags provided by the municipality are not ergonomic. You are a scientist and would like to look into this issue.

Your idea is to design a technical solution based on body sensors that will be distributed to the schools to carry out measurements on children.

Find at least three important questions which are crucial for the success of your project.

The growth of eHealth to mHealth#

electronic health (eHealth)

Medicine and health supported by digital processes

mobile health (mHealth)

Medicine and health supported by mobile devices

Exercise 15

Name two solutions enabled by eHealth and then mHealth which draws the distinction between the two.

Exercise 16

One of the fundamental building blocks of telemedicine is the internet. What happens if you want to send a data packet from a Bluetooth body sensor to a remote data analytics server?

The connected world between human and devices#

Focus in this course#

Many telemedicine applications requires sensing body data. These sensors in turn typically communicate using wireless technology. We will focus on wireless telecommunication fundamentals in context of telemedicine.

Contents