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Promotion of Home Telehealth Services, and Development of Mobile eHealth Applications in Armenia.

Among AATM’s plans for strategic development of health ICT in Armenia special place is devoted to remote patients’ monitoring and mobile (wireless) eHealth technologies. Importance of home telehealth lies in better management of chronic conditions and maintenance of health status in target groups of patients. Mobile telehealth (mHealth) emerges as one of the most promising areas of development in health ICT. 

In June 2012 AATM established cooperation with a telehealth and mHealth equipment producer company MegaKoto from Finland, and mHealth services provider Mobile Cardio from The Netherlands aiming to develop Mobile ECG Telemonitoring system for local cardiology clinics. The system consists of the central data server connected via dedicated lines with monitoring workstations installed at cardiology institutions and clinics, and lightweight highly portable single lead ECG sensors coupled via Bluetooth with Android smart phones with special application preinstalled. The sensor is reading ECG signal and sending it to the phone’s app, which uploads the data onto the server through mobile broadband connection. The monitoring workstation receives the signal in real time from the server, and displays it on large LED screens, for 7/24 live ECG monitoring by dedicated personnel. Besides that, authorized physicians are able to access their patients’ ECG data on the server, both live-streamed and stored, via special Web Access platform from any device connected to Internet. Thus, the system allows any person with heart problem to remain under ECG-surveillance 7/24, theoretically as long as the cardiologist deems necessary. Such breakthrough telemonitoring technology is being made available for Armenian population for the first time ever. The initial installations are already done (including the server and one monitoring workstation at one of the country’s leading cardiology facilities); the system has been tested in real life patients, and should now enter the commercial exploitation phase.

2016-04-15

Med-e-Tel (www.medetel.eu) is an annual international eHealth, telemedicine and Health ICT forum for education, networking and business, hosted by the International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth (ISfTeH, www.isfteh.org) and taking place in Luxembourg. On April 8, 2016, at Med-e-Tel's session "eLearning and Health ICT Education" Prof. Georgi Chaltikyan, president of AATM and local coordinator of the project in Armenia, presented a 15-minute long report titled "New Joint Master's Program in Biomedical Engineering (with Topics on Health ICT) in Armenia Developed through TEMPUS Project BME-ENA".

During the presentation Prof. Chaltikyan speaking on behalf of the project working group (including partners at EU and Armenian participating institutions), described the goals and objectives of the project, the project activities that resulted in development of the joint MSc study program, and the achievements in the program implementation in Armenia, as well as noted some specificities and challenges in implemented a multi-disciplinary joint study program, and highlighting experience of the project team in overcoming those challenges.

Besides the oral presentation, the work has been published on the web-site and electronic carrier (CD) of the conference in the form of an abstract, as well as included in the proceedings of the meeting as a full-text article. After the presentation Prof. Chaltikyan moderated a panel discussion on advances and challenges in biomedical technology education, where the panelists (Prof. Maurice Mars of the University Kwa-Zulu - Natal in South Africa, and Prof. Richard Scott of the University of Calgary in Canada) and the audience shared their experiences in developing educational programs, discussed challenges and avenues for future collaborative work.

Program: https://www.medetel.eu/?rub=educational_program&page=program#Fri

Citation: G. Chaltikyan, T. Saghatelyan, V. Buiatyan, V. Begoyan, H. Vardapetyan, S. Tiratsuyan, I. Buliev, Zh. Bliznakov. New Joint Master's Program in Biomedical Engineering (with Topics on Health ICT) in Armenia Developed through TEMPUS Project BME-ENA. Global Telemedicine and eHealth Updates: Knowledge Resources, Vol. 9, 2016: 161-167. ISSN 1998-5509.

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