Remote Medical Care

With the increment of the life standard, people pay more and more attention to their health. At the same time, some social problems, such as the aging of the population, guardianship of infants, rehabilitation of chronic diseases, increase the needs for the medical cares. To establish a remote telemedical care system is a possible optimistic way to solve this problem with the support of latest technologies. Accurate information monitoring using appropriate sensing technology is the key part for constructing a remote medical care system.

Wireless sensor network (WSN) provides a wireless approach with better and easier access to the real-time data. The data, e.g. the pulse conditions of patients, can be shared on the network at anytime and anywhere which fits the requirements of telemedicine. The feature of the WSN can help the remote medical care to be implemented in an easier fashion. For example, it can gather the data based on a wireless apparatus without cables which enables the user to wear it and move around as they wish. However, as a wearable embedded equipment, the wireless end user apparatus is limited in energy, communication bandwidth and ability to compute, so the wireless apparatus have to be designed bearing those considerations in mind.

Approach

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) can provide an excellent curative effect in medical treatment. The Chinese Pulse Diagnosis (CPD) is an important part of TCM diagnostic methodology. Chinese medicine practitioners believe that the appearance of the pulse can reveal a lot about the health. The inspection of the pulse is a convenient way for disease diagnosis and prediction. The Chinese doctor can analyze five pulse tracing attributes in term of “locations”, “frequency”, “rhythm”, “shape” and “force”, respectively, and then make an evaluation on the health condition. TCM provides powerful approach gathering comprehensive information to evaluate the user's health conditions. Hence it is very useful to combine TCM in the remote medical care.

Accomplishments

The remote medical care platform has been established, including a series of sensor module named EZ320 and a series of node named EZ210. Shilong Lu presented the paper named “Wireless Networked Chinese Telemedicine System: Method and Apparatus for Remote Pulse Information Retrieval and Diagnosis” at the 1st International Workshop on Pervasive Digital Healthcare (PerCare 2008) in conjunction with IEEE Percom 2008 in March 2008.

Future Directions

• Information fusion
• Pulse Classification
• The "four diagnostic methods" implemented in remote medical care