Telemedicine: The State of Telepresence In Healthcare (robohub.org)

Hallie Siegel writes: Telemedicine can let doctors and nurses check in on patients who might be recovering at home, or monitor people in remote locations where it's hard to access physician services. This article gives an overview of the different systems that are out there, what are some of the legal obstacles, and how various countries are investing in the technology. From the article: "The Japanese government has allocated about $23M USD to the core technology market in an effort to develop products for its aging population. Toyota, for example, is focusing on home living assistance robots that will allow those with limited mobility the opportunity to live at home. While Japan might have the largest market in the world of 65+ citizens (over 30 million as of 2014), South Korea is estimated to be allocating nearly $6B USD to their own robotics research. The Koreans are taking a different approach, using robots for mundane tasks of delivering food, allowing humans to provide care."

Comments

Maine has been doing this since 1976

[cleara]

Folks: Maine has been doing this since 1976. The Central Maine Medical Center, Saint Marys Hospital, Maine General, and Eastern Main Medical Center got connected together via a terrestrial microwave network that was developed by a Maine television visionary named Robert Cowen. Bob worked with both the University of Maine television network as well as by boss at the time (WCBB TV's chief engineer Roland Disjardins. I was one of the transmission engineers who had helped put this together at the WCBB TV transmitter site in Litchfield, Maine.

It's interesting that just about all of us who worked on this project were also amateur radio operators and much of the technology was born from our skills we gained through the hobby of amateur radio. By the way, I am WA1SEY. If any of you went to WPI, I was active in their ham radio club W1YK.

All this long before the Internet was even a faint dream in our eyes.

Re:Maine has been doing this since 1976

[ColdWetDog]

Which is exactly why this field is so annoying. We've had 'telemedicine' for decades. We have been able to have a remote physician look at and talk to a patient and the local provider ever since closed circuit TV was available. The idiot TFA basically wants to talk about other things - patents and point of care robots, but really does nothing to discuss the lack of ubiquity that evangelists have been promising. Every couple of years, some new company wanders in and tries to demo their 'new'
and invariably proprietary gizmo that is typically a combination of Skype and a fax machine.

Every couple of years somebody gets a grant for these things, uses them for about six months and then stuffs them in a closet.

Telemedicine can work for a simple doctor / patient interview but falls apart for anything more complex because medicine is quite a bit more than simply a doctor / patient interview. The remote site typically doesn't have the diagnostic gear that the consultant needs. The consultant typically doesn't have access to all of the records. And the remote site may not have the staff or equipment to treat the patient, even if the diagnosis is clear.

So at anything other than the most basic level, it has been thrown together technological bits that have long sought out a reasonable use case. Yes, you can have remote teleoporated surgeries and other hi tech stuff if you really want to pay for it. No, that isn't going to make sense for anything other than edge cases for a very long time.

The other stuff TFA briefly mentions are devices to automate point of care - getting vital signs on a home bound patient, saying hi to them, checking on if they are breathing. All well and good but something that isn't exactly earth shattering and isn't going to cure cancer or bad breath.

Not much to see here, move along.

Better Cameras

[kelemvor4]

My daughter is a Shriners' patient. I've taken her to the Tampa hospital for telemedicine visits on numerous occasions. I've discussed telemedicine with the doctors and other staff because i was interested.

For security, they aren't using internet - they're using ISDN lines and direct dial connections. Obviously this means the bandwidth requirements are tiny since it can work over ISDN.

Even the high end videoconferencing system they bought was insufficient in video quality. The camera just didn't draw enough light and have sufficient optical zoom for high quality zoomed in video. They had to buy an external video camera and cable it to an aux input port on the system. You could probably do what was needed using a modern DSLR with a good lens.

Further, we went to a hospital. This not only ensured the right camera equipment was available to the patient. It also allowed the specialist doctor to instruct local non specialists on how/what to do for minor procedures.

The whole thing worked out great, but it was slightly more involved than I thought it would be. Judging by other comments on this post, most people don't understand this.

. is the system that has been augmented with a better camera. The photo does not show the better camera.