Douglas McClure, corporate manager for technology services in the telemedicine group at Partners HealthCare, sees the value of camera phones for medical uses, but doesn’t like the quality of the lenses, according to an entry in the Wireless Doc weblog, written by Dr. Bill Koslosky.
McClure, who spoke at MIT’s Enterprise Forum conference, Connected Healthcare, says in the weblog that visiting nurses specializing in wounds sometimes go to a patient’s home two to four times per day at $120 per visit. He suggests that patients could transmit camera phone photos of their leisons to a clinic that could evaluate the healing process.
However, despite the availability of megapixel camera phones, the lens quality could be a problem. “When the optics are improved, he feels that this will be a workable solution,” the weblog notes.
Camera phones and medicine
Bill is not only a doctor who’s very interested in using technology for
medicine and a blogger, but he’s also a gagdet enthusiast, a big fan of the Treo
handsets (see left) and an excellent amateur photographer. I’ve posted articles about Bill’s recommendations for taking good
photos with Treos.
He wrote me that companies are getting very interested in so-called patient-centric healthcare that includes telemedicine, such as using wireless for transmitting data from implanted devices (e.g., defibrillators).
Several years ago cellular operators and handset manufacturers, such as Nokia, began discussing the value of using camera phones to take photos of patients’ conditions and sending the images to other doctors and hospitals for review. Many people, including me, were skeptical that the quality of the images (then just VGA) was good enough for any accurate diagnosis.
Value for healthcare
Over the years, camera phones have been tested for a variety of healthcare applications.
Physicians in remote areas have sent patient photos to doctors at hospitals for their advice. Emergency medical workers have sent photos of people in accidents, seeking advice about whether the victim should be taken to a hospital or whether a doctor should rush to the scene of the accident.
I’ve written several articles about camera phones in healthcare, including tests in the U.K., using camera phones for diagnosis in Switzerland and testing 3G camera phones in Germany.
Evaluating strokes
The article in DMeurope says, “The faster an apoplectic stroke is diagnosed, the greater the chance of recovery.
“Being able to instantly view real-time images of patients via the mobile phone could greatly increase a stroke victims' chance of recovery.”
Makes sense to me
I’m not a doctor, but I’ve viewed lots of camera phone photos and videos. Based on the quality from the better camera phones, I assume the images could indeed be extremely helpful in diagnosing and treating patients.
Under good lighting conditions and taken by people who know how to hold a camera phone so it’s properly focused, image quality from, for example, the two megapixel camera phone should be enough — possibly much more than “enough” — to produce a good image.
Of course, if there’s cellular coverage the doctor could snap a photo or video from a high-resolution digital camera and transmit it via a laptop computer connected to a phone or cellular PC card! This assumes the cellular operator will allow a large file to be transmitted.
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