Providing Mother and Child Care Telemedicine Through Interactive Voice Response

摘要

In India, telemedicine services are provided through satellite communication, Web portals and mobile call centre services. These services enable people to interact with a specialized doctor who is in the other end of the country using videoconferencing and various channels as medium. This saves time and cost of the patient using the service. He/she gets all specialized medical instructions without having the need to see the doctor. This service may be ultimately useful when available to all the people in the country. But, it does not reach everyone in the country. Satellite communication is possible only in places where satellite link is established between the patient and a doctor and Web portals are accessible only by people who have complete knowledge about the existing system mechanism. These methods are mainly available only in urban areas. This is where the problem arises in India. Villages being the backbone of the country and farmers being its soul, they are not aware of these existing technologies and telemedicine application is completely new to them. Providing specialized medical services in cities is easy, but this is not the same for rural India. Therefore, a more efficient, convenient and user-friendly method of implementing telemedicine service is needed. In this paper, we extend this approach of telemedicine to the rural areas using interactive voice response (IVR) system. Since there has been a similar methods already established in urban areas, we are providing this newly proposed system for the rural areas for a better health care.