A virtual physician's conference
Wounds suffered by patients with diabetes tend to heal poorly. For treatment to work, the patient's physician must discuss the situation with specialists and nursing staff to decide on the best approach. However, e-mailing the files containing the diagnosis and discussing them on the telephone is a time-consuming process. Telemedicine could facilitate communication and provide a better means of overcoming physical distance, but the solutions offered to date have failed to establish a market presence. 'Currently available software mostly comprises one-off solutions that are difficult to adapt to alternative application scenarios,' explains Oliver Koch from the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST. The software therefore has to be re-programmed for each application, which is a costly, time-consuming business...