Mobile phone cameras lend doctors a hand

In their two-month study, Australian doctors at Sydney's Nepean Hospital showed how this low-cost version of telemedicine helped them to treat people with hand injuries, reports ABC Science Online.

"Telemedicine, or delivering healthcare from afar using telecommunications, can be expensive and difficult to set-up, but the advantage of phone messaging was that it was cheap and easy to use.

Consultants are hard to contact and often very busy, said Lam. They rely on registrars, specialists-in-training, to describe x-rays and injuries thoroughly. Dr Tai Khoa Lam said a phone camera would help clarify that communication.

The quality of the images may be an issue, some critics say. But Lam didn't find that. "You need to hold the camera steady and know whether you should put the hand in the light or dark to get the best image."

Using mobile phone images in telemedicine has been trialled before, said Australian e-medicine specialist Professor Richard Wootton from the Centre for Online Health at the University of Queensland.

For example, doctors in Japan and Finland have used mobile phones to send images of x-rays and CT scans. And doctors in the UK have sent images to establish whether burns patients needed to be sent to a regional burns centre.

"Obviously the small screen has very low resolution," Wootton said. But he said research in Finland found the images taken of x-ray and CT scans weren't missing any crucial details."

Reported recently, a scheme to cut road deaths involving picture messaging from mobile phones has been disapointing so far. cf Camera phone test proves a flop for emergency services.

emily | 10:28 AM | How people and businesses are using cameraphones |
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