Challenges and Future Trends in Tele-Health services - ECG Acquisition and Automated Remote Processing - page 124

Chapter 6
Challenges and Future Trends
in Tele-Health services
6.1 Introduction
In the developing nations, the demand for healthcare service is expected to rise in
the coming years. Considering the present healthcare infrastructure, remote tele-
care will continue to be a dominant mode of delivering healthcare service.
Needless to say, technology will play a significant role toward this. The challenge
for the medical community, technologists, and service providers will be to deliver
the healthcare at affordable cost. The end-users like medical practitioners, para-
medics will require more exposure and training toward use of medical equipments
and systems. This chapter is aimed to highlight the challenges and trends in tele-
health systems.
6.2 Challenges in Remote Healthcare Delivery
in Developing Nations
Some of the developing nations have initiated the telemedicine service from 1980s
or later. District hospitals have been connected to city-based specialty hospitals by
some means of communication network, which may be a broadband connection,
satellite link or low-speed PSTN telephone network. Many academic and research
institutions have taken up research projects for the development of tele-health
services and prototypes have been developed. A wide band of literature is available
that tells the success story at the research level. However, in case of developing
countries like India, most of the in-service applications are in the project level [ 1 -
3 ]. In [ 4 ], a model of the e-health challenges has been discussed in the context of
developing nations. The challenges are categorized into: technological and oper-
ational, social and cultural, native environment, legal, policymaking and financial.
Among these, the technological and operational is the most important and cost-
intensive since it contributes to the interfaces of medical equipments, data transfer,
and reliability of the medical information to the remote end physician, who can not