preview

Telemedicine At A Distance : Telemedicine

Decent Essays

Our world is rapidly changing. Humankind is constantly creating new inventions that will be of benefit to us. One invention is one that will change the medical industry known as telemedicine, the Greek “tele-” meaning “to or at a distance.” This word can be directly translated to “medicine at a distance.” Telemedicine provides many benefits as well as drawbacks to the medicinal world, but it can hopefully pave a path for engineering and medicine.
Telemedicine is the use of information technologies to provide medical information to improve a patient’s health. It can be traced back all the way to the early 1900s, when people living in remote areas of Australia used radios to communicate with the aeromedical organizations. Villagers in Africa would use smoke signals to warn others to stay away from the village because of diseases. Telemedicine is split up into three categories: store-and-forward, remote monitoring, and real-time interactive services. In store-and-forward telemedicine, medical data is transmitted to be stored at an intermediary device before being forwarded to the physician. In remote monitoring telemedicine, physicians can monitor a patient’s condition using a variety of technological devices. Real-time interactive telemedicine can provide real-time interactions between patients and physicians, such as phone calls and video calls. This is comparable to an in-person clinical visit, except for the fact that is online. Telemedicine can be a great benefit to

Get Access