Towards a general purpose, scaleable workstation for remote medical consultations. Experiences from use of VIDA–a still image system for the provision of low-cost telemedicine

Abstract

Telemedicine is a way of providing medical services to patients, no matter where the patient or relevant information is located. A low-cost still image system for the provision of telemedicine services has been implemented and has been subject to field trials within several medical disciplines. The objective has been two-fold. Through our work we have aimed to bring forward a tool for remote medical consultations. Furthermore, we have earned experiences from these trials relative to the long-term task of designing a general-purpose, telemedicine workstation. We describe the objective for the work, the VIDA still image system, experiences from user trials, and discuss how these should influence the design and technical requirements for such a workstation.

Key Words:

• Telemedicine
• Medical still images
• Medical workstation
• Remote consultations