Telemedicine and Electronic Medicine PDF

Preface

Introduction

purpose of the Telehealth and Mobile Health Handbook is to provide a reference that is both concise and useful for biomedical engineers in universities and medical device industries, scientists, designers, managers, research personnel, and students, as well as healthcare personnel, such as physicians, nurses, and technicians, who use technology over a distance. The handbook covers an extensive range of topics that comprise the subject of distance communication, from sensors on and within the body to electronic medical records. It serves the reference needs of a broad group of users from advanced high school science students to healthcare and university professionals.

Recent development in digital technologies is paving the way for ever-increasing use of information technology and data-driven systems in medical and healthcare practices. Hence, this handbook describes how information and communication technologies, the Internet, wireless technologies and wireless networks, databases, and telemetry permit the transmission of information and control of information both within a medical center and between medical centers. Recent developments in sensors, wearable computing, and ubiquitous communications have provided medical experts and users with frame -works for gathering physiological data on a real-time basis over extended periods of time. Wearable sensor-based systems can transform the future of healthcare by enabling proactive personal health management and unobtrusive monitoring of a patients health condition. Wireless body area networks permit a comfortable tank top with sensors to use wireless local area networks (e.g., Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) to continuously transmit to other systems such as smartphones, and then from any location, such as home, away from home, on the streets, or a nursing home, to a medical center for analysis of cardiac arrhythmias and ventilation. For example, a simple remotely located base unit can continually collect and locally integrate many incoming signals such as electrocardiography, oxygen saturation, heart rate, noninvasive blood pressure, temperature, and respiration, and provide the information required for detecting any possible emergency cases for the patients. The medical center can then accommodate all complementary and bulky systems, including telemedicine-enabled equipment such as intensive care units, intelligent analyzers, and automatic recorders plus a professionally managed database system supported by a professional service provider.

Today technology allows clinical processes to be conducted at a distance; hence, it is an enabler, but in itself, the technology is not telemedicine. Telemedicine can be thought of as the tasks that the clinician carries out (such as observing, consulting, interpreting, and providing opinions), assisted by information and communication technologies, in circumstances where there is distance between the patient and the provider. Put succinctly, modern telemedicine is simply medicine at a distance. This handbook also intends to bridge the gap between scientists, engineers, and medical professionals by creating synergy in the related elds of biomedical engineering, information and communication technologies, network operations, business opportunities, and dynamically evolving modern medical and healthcare practices. It includes how medical personnel use information and communication technologies, as well as sensors, techniques, hardware, and software. It gives information on wireless data transmission, networks, databases, processing systems, and automatic data acquisition, reduction, and analysis and their incorporation for diagnosis.

The chapters include descriptive information for professionals, students, and workers involved in eMedicine, telemedicine, telehealth, and mHealth. Equations in some chapters also assist biomedical engineers and healthcare personnel who seek to discover applications and solve diagnostic problems that arise in medical fields not in their specialty. All the chapters are written by experts in their fields and include specialized information needed by informed specialists who seek to find out advanced applications of the subject, evaluative opinions, and possible areas for future study.