MERMAID

• Mr. George Anogianakis
  

  Biotrast S.A.
  III Mitropoleos Str. GR-54006 Thessaloniki Greece	tel: 30 31 27 79 04 fax: 30 31 27 79 60 stav@novelix.med.auth.gr
  url:

• voice medical teleconsultation is obsolete,
• videotele-phony permits "face-to-face" medical teleconsultation and remote visual inspection and
• telemedical interventions (which are critically dependent on local paramedic skills), can be aided by locally resident multimedia support.

MERMAID is developing:

1. A locally resident multimedia medical guide for ships to serve both as a training aid and as reference.
2. INMARSAT links for transfering images, sounds, text (patient anamnesis) and signals which will be feeding into a private ISDN network that links together the MERMAID health care providers.
3. The telematic means for medical teleconsultants to remotely interact with the locally resident multimedia medical guide, so that they can efficiently demonstrate health care procedures to local paramedics. Requests for help, broadcast over INMARSAT, will be routed to one or more MERMAID specialist teleconsultants depending on the type of help needed, language(s) required for efficient communication, proximity to the site of emergency etc. Thus MERMAID, by relying on telepresence and by combining locally stored multimedia reference material with remote medical consultation, proposes a viable solution to the problem of missing medical expertise for isolated points of care. It is significant that the MERMAID pilot users represent 1% of the world merchant marine, a size that guarantees the validity of its outcome and is a good start for disseminating the MERMAID results.