Telemedicine
University of Western Ontario
Department of Computer Science
CS 2125 – Fall 2012
Assignment 2
Assigned: 18 October 2012
Due: 2 November 2012
Canada is a country with concentrated urban centres and vast sparsely populated areas.
Part of the population has limited access to doctors of any sort, let alone specialists. This makes the idea of “telemedicine” – the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance – potentially attractive in the Canadian setting.
This assignment is to pick a medical specialty (e.g. cardiology, psychiatry, emergency medicine) and analyze how its practice would be different under telemedicine. You should address several points in depth. These may include the following questions, or ones of your own:
What technologies exist today that would enable practice at a distance?
What could be done with widely available consumer technology, such as PCs with web cams and Skype or Google+ hangouts, and what would require special equipment?
What would be the benefits and what would be the deficits compared to traditional medicine? How does the physician-patient relationship change? How do physician to physician interactions change?
What variations would you expect between deployment of telemedicine in P.E.I. vs
B.C? What differences would you expect between Canada, Australia and the USA?
Your analysis should be in the form of a report of 1000 words. Your writing will be graded on its factual correctness, effective writing style and quality of analysis as well as its correct use of English.
Reading material:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/story/2012/01/16/sby -telmedicine-health.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemedicine http://www.cpso.on.ca/policies/policies/default.aspx?ID=1642 http://otn.ca/ http://www.cwhonors.org/viewCaseStudy.asp?NominationID=306
Department of Computer Science
CS 2125 – Fall 2012
Assignment 2
Assigned: 18 October 2012
Due: 2 November 2012
Canada is a country with concentrated urban centres and vast sparsely populated areas.
Part of the population has limited access to doctors of any sort, let alone specialists. This makes the idea of “telemedicine” – the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance – potentially attractive in the Canadian setting.
This assignment is to pick a medical specialty (e.g. cardiology, psychiatry, emergency medicine) and analyze how its practice would be different under telemedicine. You should address several points in depth. These may include the following questions, or ones of your own:
What technologies exist today that would enable practice at a distance?
What could be done with widely available consumer technology, such as PCs with web cams and Skype or Google+ hangouts, and what would require special equipment?
What would be the benefits and what would be the deficits compared to traditional medicine? How does the physician-patient relationship change? How do physician to physician interactions change?
What variations would you expect between deployment of telemedicine in P.E.I. vs
B.C? What differences would you expect between Canada, Australia and the USA?
Your analysis should be in the form of a report of 1000 words. Your writing will be graded on its factual correctness, effective writing style and quality of analysis as well as its correct use of English.
Reading material:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/story/2012/01/16/sby -telmedicine-health.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemedicine http://www.cpso.on.ca/policies/policies/default.aspx?ID=1642 http://otn.ca/ http://www.cwhonors.org/viewCaseStudy.asp?NominationID=306