Mobile app concept: Disaster Telediagnosis

Disaster Telediagnosis is a mobile app idea that takes advantage of the bandwidth and mobility of 4G. It is a massively scalable peer-to-peer clearinghouse application providing live streaming video communication between people injured in a crisis situation and remote physicians for diagnosis and ongoing support until hand-off to local health authorities.

Whenever an injured party needs to interact with a physician, anyone with a smartphone can take a picture or stream live or archived video coverage to the internet clearinghouse to be connected in real-time with any available physician worldwide. There may be multiple interactions between patient and physician, both of whom are mobile, over the course of the case, and continuity can be preserved through high-bandwidth video connectivity. The internet clearinghouse could provide language matching or automated translation, and would log all calls based on GPS and other tagging attributes. Remote physicians could review and annotate patient electronic medical records, and the archived video files would provide patient history.

Figure 1: Disaster Telediagnosis

Any citizen with smartphone video capture could record injured parties describing their conditions, or otherwise document the status of the injured or dead. Video is streamed to the internet clearing application and on to available physicians, possibly with specialized language capabilities.

This application concept is accepted for presentation, if a demo can be realized, at the Clear 4G Symposium at Stanford in Palo Alto, CA, June 15, 2010; any interested developers and collaborators please contact the author.