原创 Streaming Media Will Enable Breakthroughs in Medical Care

Streaming Media Will Enable Breakthroughs in Medical Care
By Gene Frantz
TI Principal Fellow and Business Development Manager, DSP

If you are a college basketball fan, March is a tough month to get any work done. The NCAA Tournament is one of the signal sporting events in the United States and it consumes the entire month.

In the bad old days – three or four years ago – the Internet provided the scoreboards to each game and perhaps a little data on the leaders in statistical categories. One had to laboriously watch as each two or three point advance was logged with a definite time delay, especially if you had to refresh your browser every few minutes. But streaming media has changed all that.

I’ve mentioned before my love for a new technology called the Sling Box. It allows me to stream content from my television to any video-enabled device. But even if you don’t have this wonder from SlingMedia, you could watch any and all games of the Tournament this year because CBS is offering live online coverage. More than 15 million streams of live video were served over the first three rounds of the tournament. Five million visitors logged on during the first four days of the tournament, with a peak of 268,000 simultaneous viewers on the opening day of coverage.

My point? Streaming media as a way of accessing entertainment is a huge success. The market is expected to grow to at least 12 Billion US dollars by the year 2008 and there are no signs of slowing down. In the future, we will be able to access this content from anywhere and it will become a two-way technology allowing us to do things like sit in our living rooms while we talk live to our friends using video chat on our televisions.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg.

What intrigues me about the possibilities of streaming media are applications for home health care. With the members of the Baby Boom generation reaching an age where healthcare is becoming a defining issue, technology companies must find ways to answer the demand for better ways of handling the onslaught of new patients.

Think of what streaming media can do to help. Home medical appliances could stream medical data to hospitals for diagnosis without the patient having to leave the home. This information could also be used to self monitor health. Two-way interaction would eliminate the need for time-consuming office visits to the doctor. You might say that the best waiting room is at your house. Checkups could be done remotely with all the pertinent information streamed, analyzed and reported back. This could lead to savings not only in terms of time, but in dollars and, more importantly, lives.

When my children were small, one of my daughters continually had ear infections. My wife would call the doctor and state the obvious “Lindsey has another ear infection, send me some pink medicine.” Our doctor would reply, “No, Mrs. Frantz, you need to bring her in so I can look at her before I prescribe the medicine.” My wife generally got a bit testy at this point stating that both she and our daughter were neither dressed to make the trip or in the mood. But, without fail, they would get dressed and take the trip to the doctor. It would have been so much easier to send a “picture” of Lindsey’s ear to the doctor using streaming media and have the diagnosis done with Lindsey still comfortably in bed.