doi:10.3850/978-981-08-7615-9_RE10

ABSTRACT

The objective of telemedicine is to monitor and treat patients at home (more generally, at any location outside the hospital), under remote supervision of clinical specialists; telemedicine aims to limit or avoid inpatient care, which in turn should help to reduce the workload of clinicians and the costs of health care. Telemedicine requires autonomous monitoring and treatment, with little or no direct intervention from patients or clinicians. To be practical, monitoring and treatment systems need to be user-friendly on a long-term basis: The devices should be mobile, wearable, and operable on batteries. Consequently, telemedicine involves a wide variety of engineering challenges, from communications security and low-power hardware design, to adaptive signal processing; in this brief paper, we address the challenges related to signal processing. For the sake of definiteness, we consider telemedicine for applications in neurology, e.g., for treatment of epilepsy patients or patients with sleep disorders; we focus on electroencephalograms (EEG) recorded from the scalp or brain surface.

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