Got home last night and had an interesting chat on Telemedicine with a good friend of mine who just finished med school. A team of university students in China developed a stethoscope that could record and transmit via SMS all of the information gathered on specific patients. The problem in China is that the doctors in very remote parts of the country aren't as well trained as those in urban area hospitals - the stethoscope would solve this problem by allowing hospitals to review the information give instructions to the doctors on the ground.
This piqued my curiosity, and thus I started doing some research into this - and it turns out that there are over a dozen universities actively researching how to integrate sensors, data gathering points and transmitters in clothing. This would allow for a doctor to perpetually monitor a patient, without either party wasting time travelling.
The opportunities for "outsourcing" doctors and delivering cheap efficient healthcare to everyone are boundless. A subscription service would be ideal I think -individuals who subsribe to the telemedicine service would be provided with a set of "monitoring" clothes that they could put on whenever they felt sick. The clothes would communicate all the necessary data points to doctors either via SMS, bluetooth, or internet to the doctors and nurses on standby. The medical teams would review the information and speak with the client to determine what is wrong and what they suggest. This service could have significant implications for the elderly who may need constant monitoring...
Pedro (the friend who I was chatting with) had an interesting reflection - this service would probably work best in the United States where there is room for private enterprise in Medicine. In Spain, a system such as this one would have more trouble starting up as universal healthcare has created a free dependency on doctors - there's no real need or demand for patients to save money.... also rules and regulations from country to country may also vary drastically....
Ideally, this service would link into google health, and the patient/client could enable certain people to access his/her data points. Family members looking to keep track of somebody would thus be able to do so better from a distance as well...
The one problem I've noted is that although there have been dozens of universities and private enterprises invested in developing wearable monitoring devices since 1995, few have actually launched any type of service of product that I know of. I wonder what's holding them up? I think the platform to interact with clients will be just as important as the wearability of the garments, maybe nobody's created a viable platform yet?