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In all societies and in all eras, health has been an issue of major importance. Our times are, of
course, no different in this, except for one thing: the kind and amount of resources available to
us are augmented. During the last couple of centuries, technology has certainly been the most
important new resource made available to mankind. Thus, we have witnessed the generation
of a large series of new tools and devices that have helped the field of medicine progress and
enhance the services it is able to offer.
In our time, it is computers and communication technology that have this role in all
aspects of human activities, including medicine. As the computer-based patient record system
expands to support more clinical activities, healthcare organizations are asking physicians and
nurses to interact increasingly with computer systems to perform their duties.We have already
seen the development of a number of medical information systems and, a few years back, we
witnessed the birth of telemedicine with the utilization of networking in the field of medicine.
As work in this direction progresses, medicine, medical information systems, and networking
become more closely integrated, forming the area of e-Health and more specifically the field of
networked and distributed e-Health.
Although e-Health has already provided a number of useful tools and applications, clearly
showing its potential, it is still a field in its very early stages. As is often the case when a field
has not yet matured, its literature is distributed in a wide range of publications of related fields.
This makes it hard for researchers to monitor the state of the art and for new researchers to
enter the field, both of which have the negative effect of slowing down the growth of the field.
In this book, we review the field of networked and distributed e-Health, hoping to
provide a solid starting point for anyone interested in this marvelous science. Readers will find
the chapters to be short and concise, briefly covering main achievements and estimated future
directions in each important component of networked e-health applications, while at the same
time offering a considerable number of current references for further reading.
We hope that the material included in this book will assist the potential reader to learn
about the state of the art and future trends in the field of networked e-health applications and
telemedicine and its supporting technologies. |