Evaluation of a telemedicine platform in a burn unit

The Biomedical Engineering Group of Seville University is undertaking a telemedicine project within the Virgen del Rocio Hospital to evaluate the effectiveness of telemedicine for plastic surgery applications. Because of the increase of telemedicine in the last years, telediagnosis is becoming more and more frequent. There are no studies for telediagnosis in burns. We are testing a PC platform for that application, using a digital photographic camera for data acquisition, the standard JPEG for image compression and the telephone network as communication media. We have also defined a set of protocols to carry out all these tasks and to evaluate the effectiveness of the platform.