— Providing a remote medical consultation system using iPhone and iPad —
TRIART Limited (location: Iizuka City, Fukuoka Prefecture; Representative: Kentaro Imazu), whose main businesses are research and development of new technologies using IT and consulting, has provided a system for remote medical consultations used by Aso Chuo Hospital of the Aso City National Health Insurance (Aso City, Kumamoto Prefecture) and Kumamoto University Hospital (Kumamoto City, Kumamoto Prefecture).
The system entered full operation in April of this year. Drawing on our mobile technologies and development expertise accumulated to date, we will actively propose ways to use mobile technology in healthcare.
■ About the system provided
The remote medical consultation system provided this time is used when emergency patients arrive at Aso Chuo Hospital at times when a specialist (usually dispatched from Kumamoto University Hospital) is not on site. It connects to the hospital medical information system, contacts the attending physician at Kumamoto University Hospital directly through FaceTime on an iPhone or iPad, securely transmits vital signs, medical images, and other information about the emergency patient, and enables the physician to provide treatment advice and instructions.
The primary design goal was to make the entire process of consulting a remote specialist as simple and user-friendly as possible, from the call to transmission and viewing of medical information and provision of treatment instructions.
Medical sites require quick decisions and treatment where every moment counts. A key challenge is enabling accurate decisions and instructions without staff being distracted by operating the remote medical system.
We have designed and developed many easy-to-use mobile systems and services and accumulated expertise. That work can now also be applied to remote medicine. Conventional remote medical systems generally require large capital investments, but this system uses iPhones and iPads as client devices and can be implemented without major equipment investment.
Many viewers for iPhone and iPad have already been developed for viewing remote radiology images (DICOM format). We integrated our proprietary image brightness correction engine so that radiology images can be viewed on iPhone and iPad with contrast closer to that of medical monitors, providing contrast comparable to medical monitors (*1).
■ Future outlook
As smartphones and tablets rapidly spread, expectations for mobile devices as social infrastructure continue to grow. Practical use in healthcare and education is especially urgent. We plan to develop many systems that make effective use of our mobile system development expertise in healthcare and education.
*1 Reported in the following research paper
Takayuki Tominaga, Yuichi Kogure, Tadasuke Tsumura, Kunio Yamamoto, Tsukasa Noma
“Tone correction of DICOM images on mobile devices in a telemedicine system,” Journal of the Japan Telemedicine and Telecare Association, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 224–227, October 2011
Company Profile
Company: TRIART Limited (pronounced Yugen Kaisha TRIART)
Head office: CIRD 202, 680-41 Kawazu, Iizuka City, Fukuoka Prefecture
Representative: Kentaro Imazu
Established: January 8, 2003
Capital: JPY 10 million
Business: IT solutions
IT consulting
Internet media
Information design
URL:http://triart.co.jp/
*Company names, product names, and service names mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.