24 Journal of Advances in Biomedical Engineering and Technology, 2015, 2, 24-35 E-ISSN: 2409-3394/15 © 2015 Cosmos Scholars Publishing House Telemed-care, an Advanced ICT Platform using Facebook, Apps and Web-Technologies for Telemedicine Purposes Agostino Giorgio * Polytechnic of Bari, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica e dell’Informazione, Digital Electronics Laboratory, Via E. Orabona 4, 70125, Bari, Italy Abstract: This paper deals with a telemedicine system called Telemed-care with its own software part named Care-app, designed by the author. The platform is suitable both of them for personal computers and for mobile devices (tablet and smartphone), and properly uses all the well-known Facebook facilities, smartphone’s apps and web-apps, to support the execution of remote medical visits. Telemed-care aims at the home healthcare (homecare) including the tele-auscultation in real time already successfully validated by the heart specialists of the U.O. of Cardiology in the general hospital (Polyclinic) of the University of Bari. This paper describes the platform features and capabilities with a remote medical visit procedure. Keywords: Social network, Facebook, Telemedicine, Aemote medical visit. 1. INTRODUCTION The most recent developments in the field of electronics, informatics and telecommunications let imagine applications in the telemedicine and home care field that could mark a turning in the quality of the services for sanitary assistance, prevention and care [1]. It above all deals with home care services of chronically ill patients or patients afflicted by pathologies (such as cardiac decompensation or obstructive chronic bronchopathy) for which the home monitoring can often substitute the hospitalization with significant advantages in terms of the patient’s quality of life and of sanitary expense saving. Although there are already available instruments for the remote monitoring of the Electro Cardio Gram (ECG) [2, 3], the need is felt of reliable telemedicine devices allowing remotely the follow up of chronically ill patients. In fact, despite of the significance number of experiments, nowadays easy-to-use and low-cost telemedicine systems allowing the remote execution of complete medical visit, including the most significance examinations, using personal computers, tablet PC and smartphones are not available. The most recent trend toward the massive use by people of any age of the social networks, Facebook above all [4], and of the smartphone apps and PC web- apps, gives the right support to create an ICT * Address correspondence to this author at the Polytechnic of Bari, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica e dell’Informazione, Digital Electronics Laboratory, Via E. Orabona 4, 70125, Bari, Italy; Tel: +39-0805963239/5963579; Fax: +39-0805963579; E-mail: agostino.giorgio@poliba.it (Information and Communication Technology) platform useful for homecare purposes. Therefore, the author has developed such a platform, named Telemed-care, whose software part has named Care-app. The author already has proposed the general guidelines about the use of social networks, apps and smartphones for telemedicine purposes and the main features and functions of the software Care-app [5]. In this paper, the author describes the complete Telemed- care system and a detailed procedure to perform a remote medical visit using Telemed-care. 2. MAIN FEATURES AND CAPABILITIES As previously stated, Telemed-care is a medical electronics and informatics platform for diagnostic use, which permits the doctor to carry out a complete cardio-respiratory control on remote patients in real time. Both, the doctor and the patient, should use personal computer or tablet computer or smartphone. The operating system can be Android or iOS, indifferently. A powerful social network like Face book supports the platform to connect the doctor and the patient each other and to allow them to communicate quickly and to exchange privately, thanks to the privacy settings options, any kind of information, files, and so on. It is possible to use any other social network in place of Face book, with slight modifications to the code of the software part of Telemed-care, called Care- app.