Mobile Communications for using in Telemedicin

Abstract

Telemedicine the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance helps eliminate distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities. It is also used to save lives in critical care and emergency situations. Although there were distant precursors to telemedicine, it is essentially a product of 20th century telecommunication and information technologies. These technologies permit communications between patient and medical staff with both convenience and fidelity, as well as the transmission of medical, imaging and health informatics data from one site to another. Early forms of telemedicine achieved with telephone and radio have been supplemented with video telephony, advanced diagnostic methods supported by distributed client/server applications, and additionally with telemedical devices to support in-home care. There is a growing trend in the health domain to incorporate Smartphone's and other wireless technologies to provide more efficient, cost effective, and higher quality healthcare. With newer more sophisticated mobile devices for example, Smart phones this is an escalating practice. To date the use of mobile phone technology in the healthcare domain (m-Health) has been limited to uses such as disseminating information. However, m-Health is beginning to include software and data applications based on mobile devices and technologies. This movement is largely due to the advent of newer technologies associated with Smart phones. Some Smart phones can now be considered to be intelligent sensors with sensing capabilities such as GPS 1 location, proximity and accelerometers. This paper examines the use of such technology in providing seamless mobile communications for telemedicine.