Designing Smooth Communication Environment for Telemedicine for General Practitioner

摘要

Today's rapid advancement of the information and communication technologies enables us to perform telemedicine over the information networks. However, the realtime telemedicine is still not widely performed as a routine clinical activity. The authors developed a prototype multimedia communication system to support the realtime telemedicine and evaluated communication and technical barriers through protocol analysis. The results tell that ill synchronization and lack of nonverbal information may harm diagnostic process although the prototype enables general practitioners to diagnose a new patient from a remote site.