Solutions

Allied Telesis Solutions for Healthcare

Telehealth, Home Delivered

As costs continue to climb to provide patient care in the hospital, as well as the steadily growing elderly population, the use of Telehealth technologies to extend care outside the hospital is on the rise. The advent of a variety of new IP-enabled digital devices that can be worn or used at home for monitoring and testing opens the way to provide high quality care remotely without a patient required to schedule medical visits and use valuable doctor’s time. The Web, too, has become another enabling tool to provide on-line, real-time diagnostics and treatment from the comfort of one’s own home.

Smart Home Appliances for Telehealth Applications

Allied Telesis leverages its experience in developing market-leading fiber and broadband DSL residential service gateways for the delivery of triple play to develop next generation smart appliances targeting connected home applications that includes Telehealth. Like many smart home appliances, Telehealth devices rely on wireless technologies for connectivity, and Allied Telesis is incorporating a number of the latest wireless communications innovations that enable wearable medical devices to connect, portable monitoring or diagnostics devices to connect, as well as provide the ability to interface devices via the Web. The evolution of the ‘connected home’ encompasses the convergence of wire and wireline networks using Ethernet, as well as the mobile (3G) network and home network. Allied Telesis smart home technology provides the convergence for Ethernet communications over phone, power or Ethernet cables, as well as coax, along with wireless networking capabilities using industry-standard broadband IP interfaces to a service provider’s network. As a layer 3 router, Allied Telesis smart home appliances provides the levels or security and functionality to ensure patient and caregiver privacy is maintained, no matter how remote the location.

Leveraging Universal Broadband

As universal access to healthcare and the availability of universal broadband service connectivity meld, Telehealth services and application become a practical reality. Using network service providers as partners, health care providers can fully exploit the new generation of portable and wearable devices along with Web-based personalized care services to provide long term care to patients at home. A broadband connection assures the bandwidth is available to support video-related applications, or to send and receive digital images quickly. The smart home network appliance becomes the point of convergence between devices and applications and the services network, which in turn connects caregivers to patients remotely. Unlike telemedicine, Telehealth delivers services and diagnostics to a residence, not requiring a patient to go to a doctor’s office or medical facility to be connected to a remote medical center or specialist. It becomes an affordable means to provide long-term care without the overhead of office visits or placement in long-term care facilities for the purposes of providing access to monitoring and diagnostics systems.