Telemedicine trends and challenges: a technology management perspective

After four generations of varied applications, telemedicine now finds itself at a crossroads. Validated concepts have integrated the available technology to handle the basic system components, as well as data and information processing, in multiple manners. Medical data exchange has been tested as a result. Among the multiple technology evolutions that could be identified as significant trends we have selected four wireless broadband, non-invasive sensors, emerging multimedia standards, and open source software which are likely to have an impact on the current telemedicine progression, at the functional and economic levels. What follows is a description of each technology's main characteristics.