| Introduction The ultimate goal of medical service is to improve the quality of patient care and to save patients from death. Especially in cases of emergency situations, timely, correct and specialized management is crucial to increasing the chances of patient’s survival and in preventing patients from suffering serious injury. Immediate patient transfer to a tertiary hospital is often required for emergency patients in order to get treatment from medical specialists. Nevertheless, long distances and heavy traffic sometimes make patient transfer difficult. Therefore, methods for both making the transfer decision and prescribing the appropriate patient treatment according to specialist instructions are required for better patient care in emergency situations.As a result $of the convergence of technologies such as telecommunication, Internet and satellite, emergency telemedicine can provide an efficient means to overcome this limitation of distance and time. Many emergency telemedicine systems have been evolved for emergency personnel to communicate with remote specialists for consultation, treatment, diagnosis, or to transfer instructions using various methods of communication, including satellite services. In particular, it is possible to provide medical services via satellite in situations such as on a battlefield where no specialists are available; at sea, to treat emergency patients; in rural areas without other means of communication; and where great distances exist between patient and doctor. |
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MIRU System Configuration Web (Internet) Solution The hardware system consists of two different terminals: the emergency terminal and the specialist terminal. The asymmetrical hardware complexity (the emergency terminal is more complex than the specialist terminal) arises from the fact that all the necessary external equipment is located at the patient site, while only a microphone and video camera are required for communication at the specialist site. With this system, it is possible to relay high-resolution medical images and patient vital signs such as ECG, SPo2, BP and temperature to specialists at different sites/hospitals or even at their own homes. Various real-time patient medical data of can be sent to remote specialists by TCP/IP Internet or wireless network. In this way, patients residing in remote regions without any large hospitals nearby can access services that would otherwise be unavailable to them.
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