New frontiers for pervasive telemedicine: from data science in the wild to HoloPresence

Abstract

Telemedicine has been regarded as the natural application of information and telecommunication technology to health and healthcare. But until now its application has been limited, and mostly focused on specialized environments. The evolution of ubiquitous sensors and the pervasiveness of mobile devices, including the growing capability to sense remote parties, is opening up new exciting opportunities pioneered by mHealth applications on our mobile devices. Coupling advances in real-world sensing with multimodal signal processing and machine learning techniques is equipping us with 'super powers' that enable understanding of health-related data in real-time, opening up new opportunities to embrace 'Data Science in the Wild'. On the other side, exciting advances in augmented and mixed reality are enabling immersive experiences that are paving the way for the next generation of telemedicine through wearable see-through augmented reality displays. We believe that the intersection of these two exciting technologies currently represents one of the cornerstones for Pervasive Telemedicine. We contextualize the sensing-intervention-visualization continuum in pervasive health, by illustrating two examples from our research in terms of (i) remote assessment of stroke through multimodal pervasive sensing, and (ii) immersive mixed reality tele-surgery and holopresence. The goal is to stimulate conversation around opportunities and limits of these technologies for pervasive telemedicine.