Telemedicine is an emerging field of convergence of medicine, technology and communication. It promises the best of medicinal facilities to people in rural or far flung areas. Telemedicine provides local medical staff the guidance of an expert physician far from the site of emergency. Such timely diagnosis and treatment increases the chances of patient survival. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are expanding the availability and affordability of healthcare services. These technologies integrate electronic electronic medical information, clinical assessment tools and laboratory data to bring state of the art medical expertise to undeserved areas. Seamless sharing of information between healthcare providers has enabled the concept of hospitals without walls.

Patient data,both clinical and non-clinical, is crucial for accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment. Clinical information includes history of illness, associated signs and symptoms, clinical observations and interventions, diagnosis and treatment, etc non-clinical information includes information about the patients’s environment , demographic information, lifestyle and occupation and any other relevant information for providing daycare. In most of the situations, early diagnosis and initiation of treatment can save patients’s life. For hard-pressed local medical staff with a serious or unusual medical condition, the ability to consult specialists elsewhere can mean the difference between life and death of the patient. With advances in telecommunication in formation processing capability and miniaturization of health diagnostic equipment, it has become possible to deliver immediate and effective healthcare to the masses.

Teleconsultation

Voice, video and data are electronically communicated for consultation between geographically separated clinicians. This involves:

a) Telemonitoring: Use of Audio-visuals, electronic signal/information processing and telecommunication technologies to monitor the patient’s such details as measurements taken from devices such as blood pressure cuff, blood oxygen, thermometer, stethoscope, weigh scale, blood glucose, meter, etc.

b) Telediagnosis: Detection of a disease by observation and evaluation of the patient data acquired and transmitted from the equipment/devices monitoring the remote patient.

c) Telementoring: Using telemonitoring an expert consultant guides a distant clinician in a new medical procedure.

Data acquisition and transfer

Data can be transferred in two ways: store-and-forward and real-time interactive video. The choice depends on the clinical setting, purpose of the consultation, infrastructure and economic considerations. Emerging rends in remote monitoring and diagnosis Electronic patient record. An Electronic patient record (EPR) are the electronically stored health information about any individual uniquely identified by an identifier which entails capturing, storing, retrieving, transmitting and manipulating patient specific healthcare data (including clinical, administrative and biographical data).

Home Telecare: The home telecare solution allows visual assessment of the patient, tracking of vital signs and review of the medications remotely,eliminating the need for the physician to be the physically present or the patients who may otherwise be unable to receive them due to geographic distance barriers. thus it holds a great promise in managing the health needs of individuals living in rural and remote areas. The home telecare system comprises a home care unit serving as the video interface, a camera and a gateway.

Emergency care: These devices have the ability to telematically “bring in” an expert emergency, allowing him to review the vital signs and issue directions on patient managements and treatment procedures to the emergency personnel until the patient is administered first aid and the hospital. This results in effective patient management, as the patient and initiate the treatment immediately. Medical Images and waveform can even be downloaded, stored, displayed and exchanged on personnel digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones, so these can be accessed at any time, anywhere to aid remote diagnosis and referrals.

Smart cards: Smart cards act as a portable, comprehensive and accurate source of up-to-date patient information. These can provide basic medical information about the patients, such as lists of drug sensitivities, current conditions being treated, name and phone number of the patients’s doctor and other information vital in an emergency. These can also carry vital medical history and details about insurance coverage. Remote diagnostics and related decision-making process can be integrated efficiently as the patients could carry the repository of information wherever he/she goes to receive treatment.

Telesurgery: Telesurgery is the provision of surgical care over a distance, with direct, real-time visualization of the operative field. it may be categorized into telepresence surgery and telerobotics. telepresence surgery uses a computerized interface to transmit a surgeon’s actions at the surgical workstations to the operative site at the remote surgical unit, with haptic feedback about the tactic environment of the operative fields to the surgeon. Telerobotics is remote control with a robotic arm, usually in conjunction with a laparoscope, without haptic feedback. In the future, though telemedicine will take some time to be available to ordinary people, it will have the greatest impact in the area of home healthcare, since the efficiencies realized are unimaginable.

Solar System means system of the sun. All bodies under the gravitational influence of our local star, the Sun, together with the Sun, forms the solar system. The largest bodies, including Earth revolving around the sun are called planets. Often smaller cool bodies, called satellites and moons, orbit a planet. Bodies smaller than planets that orbit the sun are classifieds as Asteroids if they are rocky or metallic from the region between Mars & Jupiter, Comets if they are mostly ice & dust, and Meteoroids if they are very small.

How Big is Our Solar system ?

To think about the large distances, we use a cosmic ruler based on the astronomical unit(AU). 1 AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun, which is about 150 million kilometres. the area of the Sun’s influence stretches far beyond the the planets, forming a giant bubble called the heliosphere. The enormous bubble of the heliosphere is created by the solar wind, a stream of charged gas blowing outward from the Sun. As the Sun orbits the center of the milky way, the bubble of heliosphere also moves ahead of itself in interstellar space through the interstellar gases. The area where the solar wind is abruptly slowed by pressure from gas between the stars is called the termination shock. That was observed when Voyager 1 began sending unusual data to Earth in late 2003. In December 2004, thats how scientists confirmed that Voyager 1 had crossed the termination shock at about 94 AU, approximately 13 billion kms from the sun,venturing into the vast, turbulent expanse where the Sun’s influence diminishes. Voyager 2, 16 billion kilometres from Voyager 1, crossed the termination shock in August 2007. Voyager 1 may reach in interstellar space sometime between 2014 & 2017; when voyagers exit the enormous Oort Cloud, a vast spherical shell of icy bodies surrounding the solar system.

Solar System: As we know it

A Solar system refers to a star and all the objects that travel in orbit around it. Our Solar system consists of the sun – our Star – Eight planets and their natural satellites (such as our moon); dwarf planets; asteroids and comets. Our solar system is locally in an outward spiral of the Milky Way galaxy.

Our Solar System Consists of-

• Planets:8 – The planet count in our solar system has gone as high as 15 before new discoveries prompted a fine tuning of the definition of a planet.
• Dwarf planets:6 – This new class of worlds helps us categorize objects that orbit the Sun but aren’t quite the same as the rocky planets and gas giants of our solar system. There could be hundreds more of these small worlds far out there waiting to be discovered.
• Moons:173 – This Counts includes only the moons orbiting the eight planets in our solar system. it is likely there are more moons orbiting the giant planets of our solar system and there are moons orbiting around dwarf planets and asteroids.
• Asteroids:645,118 – New asteroids are discovered on an almost daily basis. it is estimated that the mineral wealth of the asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter is about $100,000,000 for every person on Earth.
• Comets:3,279 – orbiting spacecraft such as SOHO have raised this tally in recent years by catching the comets as they plunge towards the Sun – and sometimes vaporize. Scientists estimated there could be as many as 1,000,000,000 comets held in the gravitational grip of the Sun.