Guest editorial: Telecommunications for Remote Medicine

edical industry is one of the largest and fastest- growing parts of a country’s economy, where the involved products and services cover the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans. The expectations on improving the quality of medical services while simultaneously reducing the service cost pose a big challenge to the modern medical care. As the science and technology about the transmission of messages over a distance for the purpose of communication, telecommunication have allowed a wide range of potentially novel paradigms of remote medicine, e.g., tele-consultation, tele-expertise, tele-monitoring, tele-assistance, and tele-surgery, which can eliminate distance barriers and improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities and emergency situations. This fact has recently motivated a voluminous amount of research activities on exploiting the potential provided by the new technologies of telecommunication to improve remote delivery of medical care. The goal of this Feature Topic is to explore the research and developments related to telecommunication for remote medicine.