Demonstrations and Pilot Projects
Telemedecin and Tourism
Group Report
Pierre Bernhard
INRIA
The session was made up of four papers, one divided into two coordinated
talks. They were, chronologically,
- S. Orphanoudakis (FORTH, Grece) : Integrated Regional, National
and Transnational Networks
- C. Ruggiero (University of Genova, Italy) and R. Dieng (INRIA, France)
: Towards a W3 Accessible Knowledge Base on Breast Cancer Diagnosis and
Therapy
- G. Grunst (GMD, Germany) : Enabling Systems in Telemedecine
- M. Bouziane (INSMO, Algeria) : Expérience de mise en place
d'un réseau hospitalo-universitaire
The talks helped emphasize the various uses of telecommunications in medical
practice (tele-expertise for diagnosis help, on site multi-expertise,...),
monitoring, and also education.
This last point was particularily emphasized by Dr Grunt's talk. His video
showed the audience how modern multimedia technology lets one ``see'' what
is impossible to see in reality, such as a cutaway beating heart. Moreover,
such a vivid demo can be distributed easily, may be downloaded via a network,
and thus made available in places where there is no advanced educational
facility.
Dr Bouziane reported the difficulties of setting up a professional network
in a community and a country with little or no IT litteracy. He used an
Intranet approach in his medical institute to link people with each other,
and with the INTERNET. A particular emphasis was placed on bibliographical
resources, a topic which is closely related to digital libraries.
In this vein, Dr Ruggiero and Dieng likened their experiment in broadcasting
on the WWW a knowledge base on breast cancer diagnosis, to an 'advanced
digital library'. As a matter of fact, as in a library, the aim is to make
a knowledge available to a wide audience. However, the material to be so
publicized goes beyond a written document and embeds a real knowledge base.
Dr Orphanoudakis rightly pointed out that high bandwith is not always necessary
to do practical things. Much material is symbolic information. His experience
with the public health system of Crete shows how a pragmatic approach lets
one improve the sanitary situation immediately. Telemedecine will ``pay
for itself'' says Dr Orphanoudakis. Start with what you get, and one will
find the resources to upgrade the system when it has proved its worth. A
key idea behind much of the experiments reported is to move expertise around
the country, or across borders, without moving the experts nor the patients.
Tourism
The session was made up of three papers.
Mr M. Wilson proposed a very detailed analysis of where the added value
of information systems lie in the tourism business, essentially in managing
the chronological gap between reservations and actual sales, and the variety
of the players involved. This analysis is a prerequisite if one is to devise
successful IT products for tourism professionals. His first experience with
concrete products substantiates that claim.
The other two talks were centered around demos of advanced products. M.
Vitrey, of 'Mediterranee On Line' showed a commercial product available
on the Web. The technology of the Web proves a very attractive means of
distributing this type of product, and that demo proved that very convincing
commercial products already exist.
The final speeker was Dr Benabdallah, from IRSIT (Tunisia). Mr Benabdallah's
demo was a bit sabotaged by...the technology provider. The thrust of his
talk was on the fruitful cooperation of geographic information systems and
multimedia technology to devise tomorrow's electronic travel catalogues.
Coupled with network downloading, or a downgraded version of it through
an efficient mail release of CD-roms, this lets the professionals have up
to date information - a crucial point in that business - much richer than
the traditional catalogue.