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The nowadays social communities
are coping with increased Human Health and Safety
threats in terms of medical emergencies given by domestic
situations (chronic patients crisis, strokes, heart attacks
etc.), professional related risks, traffic events, natural
local disasters (floods, landslides, earthquakes etc.),
man-made local disasters (industrial, military, terrorist
etc.), global disasters (space related, climate changes
etc.), but also concerned with screening activities in
order to reduce the incidence, the mortality and the suffering.
Furthermore, the human health and safety issues are even
more serious when they occur in remote, deprived areas
with difficult accessibility and precarious or inexistent
medical assistance coverage. Thus, in the aforementioned
context, Critical Telemedicine and Medical Support for
Crisis Management services stands for one of the most
comprehensive solutions via advanced telecommunication
and computer multimedia technologies to support medical
therapeutic, diagnostic, monitoring and treatment activities,
exchanging medical information between physicians and/or
physicians and patients, within emergency medicine, home/long
term health care, disease preventions etc.
In Romania, among the pioneers of Telemedicine initiatives,
there were researchers from the Institute of Space Science
that took part, together with hospitals, companies and
independent professionals, in the first national, public
funded, telemedicine projects between hospitals: The
Fundeni Telemedicine Pilot (2001-2004), Medicine
and Welfare Excellence Center (2002-2004).
Furthermore, based on their interdisciplinary engineering
knowledge and their gained experience, they have advanced
towards new Telemedicine based applications to fulfill
new users and communities needs, proposing new concepts,
prototypes, and applications of mobile telemedicine: the
first Real Mobile Telemedicine demo project (2004)
followed by the Telemedicine
Applications in the Danube Delta (2004-2006) and the
Portable Telemedicine Workstation Feasibility Study, Definition
and Specification - PTW funded under an ESA-PECS scheme
(2010-2012) and continued by the PTW
- PECS Full Prototype (2012-to be completed by mid-2015).
Besides the numerous Telemedicine accomplishments already
carried out and ongoing, the ISS Human Health and Safety
Laboratory, opened to fructuous Telemedicine research
and development collaborations, continues, at international
level, to perform important new advanced Telemedicine
applications based on space technologies in wide preoccupation
fields, as: interoperability of national Telemedicine
systems for national/cross-borders disasters and crisis
management; humanitarian telemedicine for underserved
areas towards providing primary/secondary care, just to
name a few. |
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