Automating remote monitoring and information therapy: An opportunity to practice telemedicine in developing countries

In industrialized countries telemedicine has proven to be a valuable tool for enabling access to knowledge and allowing information exchange, and showing that it is possible to provide good quality of healthcare to isolated communities. The modern information and communication technology provide tremendous potential for improving healthcare also in developing countries. However there are many barriers to the widespread implementation of telemedicine in rural areas of developing countries. These include deficient Internet connectivity and sophisticated peripheral medical devices. Further, to make things worse, developing countries have very high patients-per-doctor ratios. In this paper, we report our work on developing an appropriate software tool, called Health Agent, for automating telemedicine in rural areas of developing countries. It automates ordinary remote monitoring and information therapy. In the automation of remote monitoring we exploit the functionalities of SQL-triggers provided by active relational database management systems, and in automating information therapy we exploit our developed health ontology, which is specified by the modelling primitives provided by Semantic Web technologies RDF and OWL.