The CS-lunch is a seminar series at the Department of Computers Science at the University of Tromsø. Here you will meet students and scientists from the Computer Science Department for a scientific talk and free lunch. There will be a different topic at each lunch.
First out is masterstudent Dani Beckman presenting the paper "Which Telemedicine Services Work In Arctic Environments - A Systematic Literature Review From 1984-2015". The paper was written with guidence from Ståle Walderhaug, and will be presented at Arctic Frontiers 29th of January.
Which Telemedicine Services Work In Arctic Environments - A Systematic Literature Review From 1984-2015
Dani Beckmann, Pietro Randine, Christian Marstrander Reehorst, Bjørnar Grøholt Prytz
Objective
Since the early years of modern technology, the application of telemedicine in healthcare has always been apparent, and sometimes a driving factor for development - especially in rural areas or communities. The purpose of this review is to assess and report findings that are published between 1984 up to 2015, focusing on two questions; "which telemedicine concepts are fitted for an arctic environment?" (1) and "what is the focus of telemedicine projects in the arctic?" (2).
Methods
For this review, we have conducted literature searches in peer reviewed journals and articles in the various databases including Google Scholar, (Springer), IEEE Xplore and ACM Digital Library. The work was conducted following best practices for structured literature review.
Results
The technology behind Telemedicine is ultimately tools used by people, which promotes accessibility and quality of service. In this review we see a tendency that the users are inclined to favour simple technological adaptations of these tools, and that complicated solutions generate factors that are potential problems. For our results we found that few papers are addressing our research questions; where the initial search gave some 3000 papers based on title. This was narrowed down to 266 papers based on abstracts, and finally down to 35 papers by content. These were then defined into 7 non-exclusive categories: Development, education/training, human factors, mental healthcare, rescue, self-monitoring, and video transmissions.
Conclusion
Connectivity and distance in the arctic regions is a recurring issue, and while there is a multitude of papers on this topic among other rural areas, publications in context to an arctic environment remains largely poor. More scientific and realistic evaluations are called for, preferably starting with simple systems already in use.