Tele-medicine
In Nepal, there is acute shortage of doctors. The total numbers of allopathic doctors are 4000 and majority of them are staying in capital and other major cities. The people and doctors ratio is approximately 6000: 1. In this situation even there is no health post in remote rural villages. To take basic facilities of quality health services in rural area Nepal wireless project is running pilot tele-medicine project, in 3 centers. These three centers Nangi, Paudar and Tolka are connected by the wireless network with the Om Hospital located nearest city Pokhara.
For this telemedicine programs running by Nepal wireless project has obtained, high quality network cameras. It has been uses the Panasonic BL-C10A camera. These cameras offer a video quality that far surpasses ordinary webcams that has made possible through the relatively high speed of data transfer within the network. The network cameras are actually a camera and computer combined in one intelligent unit. Therefore they connect directly to the LAN without requiring a computer. Moreover, the zoom, pan, and tilt feature on the Panasonic BL-C10A camera can be controlled remotely. This feature of the Panasonic camera has been useful for the doctors in order to look at a patient from different angles. Regarding the establishment of connectivity between hospital and tele-medicine center are using a variety of wireless devices to maintain connectivity between the nodes. Conceptually, we have divided this into a network backbone, which connects the Pokhara Base Station to the two major relay stations, and client connections, which connect villages to the relay stations. The network backbone is connected with Motorola Canopy radios at 5.7 GHz, whereas connections to other areas use wireless Ethernet (IEEE 802.11b standard) radios at 2.4GHz from various manufacturers. The Motorola devices were used for the backbone connection due to their high reliability, robustness, and to avoid signal interference. However, 802.11b radios were used for village connections due to their lower cost and the compatibility between manufacturers.
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