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.

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.