Hands-on practice and implementations on Internet-based remote ENT diagnosis systems

This paper presents an asynchronous Internet-based ear-nose-throat diagnosis system to promote the location independent diagnosis. This work proposes a new medical service mechanism for the patients who may ask for diagnosis at home or office instead of going to hospital. Based on the proposed medical service mechanism, the ENT physicians can diagnose the electric patient record (EPR) through the Internet. In addition, the patients can submit the physiological signals and multimedia data at home or office. Especially, the quality of multimedia data can be maintained based on the asynchronous diagnosis mechanism. The tentative diagnosis can suggest the patients to the clinic, local hospital, general hospital, or medical center for advanced face-to-face diagnoses to balance the national medical resources. The practical implementations of this work include the digitalized ENT symptoms and signs acquisition devices, remote electrical diagnosis box (REDB), remote patient data acquisition (RPDA) program, and virtual hospital service (VHS) Web server. The academic prototype had been implemented in terms of the in-lab design hardware devices and software programs. Finally, the entire system has been verified for several clinical trials, and they are reported in this paper.