What is Telehealth ??

According to Mosby's Medical Dictionary, 8th edition, telehealth is “the use of telecommunication technologies to provide health care services.” After the prosperity of telecommunication technologies, telehealth will become a popular business in the next ten years. Health professionals discussing one case via telecommunications is one kind of telehealth. Besides, transmitting medical or surgical information or images to provide clinical care is also one kind of telehealth, but it is usually called “telemedicine.” By the way, it is easy to confuse telehealth with telemedicine. Telemedicine is one kind of telehealth, but telemedicine particularly refers to providing clinical care. We will need more efficient ways to take care of the elderly such as telehealth, because the population of the elderly are growing. As a result of a large amount of data from people’s vital signs, health service providers need to spend a lot of time reading an extremely huge group of people’s data. Telehealth is a good way to deal with the health of the elderly. Moreover, by using telehealth, it is easy to increase the health awareness of the elderly. The elderly would follow the good health guidelines, and they will become more healthy. In addition, by using telehealth, it is easy to train and educate the elderly how to have a healthy body. To sum up, telehealth will become a hot trend because the number of elderly population who want to have good health are going up.

Who Will Buy the BabyBot (Telehealth Device)?

Consumers will not buy the BabyBot without service providers because it is a meaninglessness. So, customers of BabyBot are health care service providers. The National Taiwan University Hospital, who is one of BabyBot’s customers, is worth of telehealth service providers because their business model is innovative. Most important is a few consumers willing to pay they for the telehealth service. First, their consumers are not normal people. Patients who have a cardiovascular disease, a heart failure disease, or a chronic disease are their customers because they need telehealth device to record their vital signs and to send the data to the National Taiwan University Hospital. The medicine staff can monitor the data of patients’ vital signs in the hospital without going to the patients’ house. Moreover, the telehealth package includes a telehealth device and a telehealth service. The National Taiwan University Hospital rents BabyBot to the customers and they provide health care service to the customers. Then, they will charge the total monthly fee. In 2010, they provided only package that included all of BabyBot devices and the total monthly fee was NT5’000. In 2011, they provide five packages. One of the packages includes a sphygmomanometer and a ECG recorder and the total monthly fee is NT3’900. To sum up, health care service providers are the customers of BabyBot.

Telehealth Center of National Taiwan University Hospital
http://www.ntuh.gov.tw/telehealth/default.aspx

What is BabyBot (telehealth system)?

BabyBot was a telehealth system that is developed by a new start-up company. It is assembled by a computer box that connects several with medicine devices such as sphygmomanometer, blood glucose meter, blood oxygen meter, scales,thermometer, ECG, and PF meter. Moreover, the users’ vital signs can be measured by each medicine device, and BabyBot gathers the data through USB lines, and the data will be sent to BabyBot’s platform. Doctors, users, and users’ families can see the data through a browser any where. BobyBot is assembled by a computer box, but it have no keyboard or mouse. It can be controlled by a remote control, so it is specifically designed for the elderly who are unfamiliar with computers. This seems to be an innovative design. To sum up, BabyBot was created by a telehealth system company that has powerful development skills.