Leased line via mobile infrastructure for telemedicine in India

Abstract

Telemedicine is the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to exchange medical information for the purpose of health care and health education. In the context of developing countries, good health care facilities are concentrated in the urban cities, while they are still lacking in rural communities with lower economies. Telemedicine provides a best solution to solve this disparity of health sectors between urban and rural areas. In rural areas of developing countries, a reliable communication link for telemedicine is one of the key challenges. In the recent years, there is an increasing growth of mobile communication in developing countries that has saturated in urban cities and now growing towards the rural areas. This article focuses in India as a developing nation and discusses the cost effective use of widespread mobile communications infrastructure for communication link for telemedicine in rural areas. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.