TeleMedMail: free software to facilitate telemedicine in developing countries

Abstract

Telemedicine offers the potential to alleviate the severe shortage of medical specialists in developing countries. However lack of equipment and poor network connections usually rule out video-conferencing systems. This paper describes a software application to facilitate store-and-forward telemedicine by email of images from digital cameras. TeleMedMail is written in Java and allows structured text entry, image processing, image and data compression, and data encryption. The design, implementation, and initial evaluation are described.