Home telehealth enabling remote nursing visits and vital sign monitoring through fully interactive voice, video and data transmission, and targets healthcare service delivery in rural and remote areas

Telecare supports the commercialisation and deployment of home telehealth solutions to be delivered over two-way satellite networks. This solution enables remote nursing visits and vital sign monitoring through fully interactive voice, video and data transmission, and targets healthcare service delivery in rural and remote areas. This solution is unique in that the targeted operators/users of this system are homecare nurses and their patients, therefore careful application of advanced technologies must be considered in the development and design. Successful adoption of this type of solution will be very dependent on the ability to deliver a user friendly, seamless end to end solution, that provides both economic value and enhances the ability of caregivers to deliver healthcare to their patient base. The research and development effort will focus on development of the web-based software application, the communications interface that will allow the solution to be deployed over two-way satellite, and extension of the health monitoring kit (patient terminal) to support broader disease management capabilities as a strategic business direction for the solution as a whole. The March Networks telehealth solution is being developed as a productivity tool to address healthcare delivery challenges, including chronic healthcare professional shortages, access to care for patients, and to assist in early intervention and prevention in support of disease management. The TeLeCare solution builds on the architecture used for the March Networks telehealth pilot project but expands on the original pilot functionality while lowering the component costs, improving the user experience, and increasing the system level security, supportability, and reliability. The resulting system is intended to be a scalable solution that can be deployed in a commercial offering. The solution architecture is centred on a hosted application. Nurse and patient terminals access the network application server (NAS) directly and can be connected in a peer-to-peer fashion for a remote visit or e-learning application.