The Potential of Telemedicine

Abstract

Telemedicine as a communication technology to overcome geographical distances can increase the quality of medicine. The prerequisite for telemedicine is that two persons or groups of persons are connected with each other. Often this connection is built beforehand during a face-to-face-meeting when both partners apportion the communication devices. If an emergency patient is not already part of a telemedicine project, the connection has to be newly created and the device to build the connection has to be brought to the patient. In the EU-funded LiveCity-Project the hypothesis was evaluated, that in emergency situations a telemedicine connection between a patient and a remote medical doctor can be accomplished by a device brought to the patient by paramedics. It was to be established if communication with a head mounted video-camera coupled with a LTE internet connection was feasible for this purpose.