Internet electronic mail: a tool for low-cost telemedicine

Electronic mail, in addition to the sending of text messages, may be used to transfer multimedia and privacy-enhanced messages. Email can be used for so-called store-and-forward telemedicine, which can be particularly useful for remote consultations. This paper reviews the standards used in Internet email, from communication protocols to the message formats, and pays special attention to multimedia and confidential messages; it then describes some email-based telemedicine applications. The problems of the Internet are principally the lack of any guarantee of quality of service and the low bandwidth; intranets can guarantee appropriate performance.