A WWW Based Tele-Healthcare Information and Diagnostic Environment

The Malaysian Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) project promotes Telemedicine as a flagship application. The primary objective of MSC-based telemedicine—more appropriately Tele-Healthcare—is to establish a healthcare system leveraging advanced information and multimedia technologies so as to deliver hitherto unattainable services at the individual level. With similar vision, though limited in scope, we present a Telehealthcare infostructure (TIDE) which provides a testbed to explicate the efficacy of innovative IT technologies in defining an Internet based healthcare delivery system. TIDE—Tele-Healthcare Information and Diagnostic Environment—manifests an ‘intelligent’ information theoretic Tele-healthcare environment featuring knowledge-based medical reasoning techniques applied to two AI-based healthcare systems: (1) AIMS (Automated Health Monitoring System) for wellness maintenance and (2) IDEAS (Intelligent Diagnostic & Advisory Services) for illness management. In technical terms, TIDE’s implementation demonstrates a confluence of diverse information technologies—artificial intelligence, medical informatics, multimedia, Internet and databases.