The Mobile Patient and the Mobile Physician Data Access and Transmission

practice of medicine is the tremendous increase in personal mobility and the upcoming deployment of a wide array of non-invasive microsensors to monitor a person’s condition, along with advances in medical imaging devices. Wireless communications, the Internet, and low-cost air travel has now created a new class of patients, the “mobile sick,” and likewise the “mobile physician.” This has created the need for mobile monitoring of patients as well as for mobile physician access to medical information, leading to recently developed light-weight, easy-to-wear, and affordable vests. In parallel, smaller medical imaging devices and soon capsule size video cameras for body ducts are producing increasingly large and detailed amounts of imaging data, from which to identify conditions of interest such as malignant tumors. We present the necessary requirements that current medical information technology infrastructure needs to meet to enable monitoring of mobile patients by mobile physicians, in addition to a timeline user-interface to access patient information anywhere and anytime.