Virtual Medicine Using Cell Phones

In today’s society mobile phones and their application are constantly used. As cell phone dependence increases there is an increase in demand for new, useful apps. In the past few years mobile health (mHealth) applications such as Apple Health have been increasing in popularity. The scientific community has seen this recent trend and are trying to use mHealth to benefit the medical field through telemedicine.

Telemedicine is an emerging technology that allows a doctor to examine and diagnose a patient from afar. One of these new telemedicine apps could allow a doctor to examine a patient’s abdominal pain through virtual palpitations and video chat. In using this application, a doctor would first be able to talk to a patient on the phone to determine the urgency of the abdominal pain. If urgent, the physician would then be able to use an app on their cell phone (which would essentially turn the phone into an acceleration and motion sensor). Using this sensor the physician would perform a self-abdominal palpitation, and link their phone with their patient’s phone. The patient is given instructions on how to conduct a palpitation and then does so using their own phone. The patient’s palpitation depth and length are recorded and compared to physician’s palpitation. Once the patient’s palpitation matches the physician’s, the doctor can diagnosis their patient remotely and direct them in the next step towards treatment. David Myers et. al (2017) experimentally tested this application to see whether or not telemedicine is efficient in diagnosing abdomen pain (Abdominal Pain virtual assessment).They found that 81% of the tested patients were able to match the palpitations of their physician with an average of six attempts.

Even though this telemedical application was found effective, there are still factors that need to be considered before telemedicine can be fully integrated into the medical field. For instance, how will telemedical applications take into account patient confidentiality? Cell phone calls and video chats can be insecure which increases the chances for a security breach. In addition, how well do doctors diagnose a patient through virtual communication? Although patients were found to mimic their physician’s palpitation, can a doctor adequately diagnose just by watching and listening to a patient? Sometimes a physical, one on one examination can help a physician determine if the patient has an actual reason for being in pain or if the person they are examining are simply overly cautious. The feasibility of telemedicine is quite interesting and my be beneficial for future health care professionals, however more information on the effectiveness of security and diagnosis should be studied before this technology is integrated into modern medicine.

References:

Myers, D. R., Weiss, A., Rollins, M. R., & Lam, W. A. (2017, October 06). Towards remote assessment and screening of acute abdominal pain using only a smartphone with native accelerometers. Retrieved October 09, 2017, from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-13076-x